It's Christmas Eve, Where's the Email?

[Tommy Chang]

I don't post to this list much, but when I do, it's a forward.  

The email below was originally sent by Mike Kojima in 2001.

Is Santa Dead?

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 1/1000th of a second to park
the sleigh, 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 or 3813 times the speed of sound
assuming instantaneous acceleration which is not
possible but since I suck at math and am lazy, I'll
just assume this. For purposes of comparison, the
fastest man made vehicle, the Voyager space probe,
moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second, and a
conventional reindeer can run (at best) 20-25 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 pair of
reindeer would adsorb 14.3 quintillion joules of
energy per second each. In short,they would be
vaporized almost instantaneously,exposing the reindeer
behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in
their wake. The entire reindeer team would be
converted into superheated plasma within 4.26
thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa
reached the fifth house on his trip. The sleigh would
fair no better, even if it was constructed of modern
engineering metals and composites instead of wood, it
would be torn apart in milliseconds by the
acceleration of the reindeer team and the aerodynamic
forces imposed on its structure.  Even rail guns, the
devices capable of producing the fastest acceleration
of projectiles made by man, are several orders of
magnitude slower than our sleigh.

Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result
of accelerating from a dead stop to 650 m.p.s. in less
than .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 rendering him into a
quivering blob of pink goo. Therefore, if Santa did
exist,he's dead now.

Merry Christmas!

Mike



________________________________
 From: Jon Pennington <cowboydren at gmail.com>
To: se-r list <se-r at se-r-list.org> 
Sent: Saturday, December 24, 2011 10:40 AM
Subject: It's Christmas Eve, Where's the Email?
 
Somebody has to send it, and I don't have a copy. Where's the
Engineer's Proof that there is no Santa?

-- 
-=|JP|=-     <//><

Why, yes, I *can* cross-thread a ketchup bottle.
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