Lightspeed Santa

the_syco

Found this on Mikado, Maynooth University's/URL] forum.

Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2003 10:27 am Post subject: Santa does engineering.

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There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18 ) in the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist (except maybe in Japan) religions, this reduces the workload for Christmas night to 15% of the total, or 378 million (according to the population reference bureau). At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming there is at least one good child in each.

Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 967.7 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with a good child, Santa has around 1/1000 th of a second to park thesleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stocking, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh and get onto the next house. Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purposes of our calculations), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stops or breaks. This means Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second - 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles per hour.

The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized Lego set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousands tons, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that the "flying" reindeer can pull 10 times the normal amount, the job can't be done with eight or even nine of them---Santa would need 360,000 of them. This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch). 600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance - this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft reentering the earth's atmosphere. The lead air of reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each. In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip.

Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650 m.p.s. in .001 seconds, would be subjected to acceleration forces of 17,000 g's. A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo. Therefore, if Santa did indeed exist,...... he's dead now.

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Also if each home leaves about 6 cookies and a pint of milk. Santa would have to be big enough to hold 642 cookies and 108 million pints of milk! Santa would have to be pretty big or else go to the toilet in each house.

henbane

Originally posted by the_syco
Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650 m.p.s. in .001 seconds, would be subjected to acceleration forces of 17,000 g's. A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo. Therefore, if Santa did indeed exist,...... he's dead now.

Jeez, hasn't he heard of inertial dampers?

Yavvy

fools...dont you know Santa is magical and can infact "bend time" actually the normal laws of time and motion do not apply to Santa so the above calculation does not apply.

As for the size of his sleigh..have you ever seen Mary poppins hand bag ? Santa's sleigh works in a similar manner. its magical.

now, the article also references "good " children, Santa doesn't care in a child is good or bad. What Santa is looking for is "nice children" (ref "Santa Claus is coming to town" artists unknown) this increases the number of childers he gives presses to.

As for the milk and cookies and often a carrot for the reindeer...Santa and all his helpers have extremely complex and advanced metabolisms and require each bit of sustenance they intake and expel none of it.


Magic...is there anything it cant do ??

Töpher

It can't make me pretty!

Yavvy

no ..but have you considered invisability ?

quank

so, wait..... santa...... santa, isn't real????

first micheal jackson, now santa claus!
oh god, my life is pointless.....

*hangs self

kmart6

MMMMM my calculations seem to give different results

hahaha:D

Capt'n Midnight

And no one has considered the enviromental problems. All that heat, the noises of the sonic booms and all those nitrous oxides caused by the temperatures involved.

Any way there is a rational logical scientific explaination, since he is a time lord he must have a tardis.

PS. is there a metric version

PPS. A picture of Santa http://www.missnorway.no/www/de/arkiv_detaljer.asp?id=19

Töpher

Hmmmm... I think I may be up for Santa this year....

Yavvy

im already up for santa