Bonneville America Forums Forums Off Topic Discussion Forums Lounge How Engineers Spoil Christmas

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 to get back up the chimney, into the sleigh and get onto the next house.

Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which we know, of course, 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 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a pokey 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 of two pounds, the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousand 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.

A mass of nearly 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 re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair 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 miles per second in .001 seconds, would be subjected to acceleration forc es of 17,000 g's. A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrous considering all the high calorie snacks he must have consumed over the years) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force, instantly crushing him. Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's now deceased.
Merry Christmas!

HO! HO! HO!

(...or is that not politically correct anymore?)

Gotta love the engineering brethren!

But...but...but Santa is magic. He told me he has the ability to slow time so this all becomes not applicable. He slows time but can move freely so what seems like a split second to us seems like days to him.

54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth - the ship, not the monarch.

"HO HO HO"....reminds me of an ol' girlfriend I had...

i bet you'd screw up a wet dream

I dont care what you say. Santa is real, every year i have my picture taken with him.

Of course, the git never brings me what i ask for. Supposedly he cant get a Ducati in his sack. Personally i think he is a lazy git and cant be bothered to get it for me.

Get me a Ducait you ***** ***** Ive been good.

Don't you people live in a town with more than one department store.... the answer is quite obvious, there is more than ONE Santa. I won't bother with the math but in my travels the other day I saw no less than four Santas, and that was just downtown.

Quote:

---

the answer is quite obvious, there is more than ONE Santa

---

Wash your mouth with soapy water. More than one Santa.

Post deleted by Dwight

(see below)

...or Soren...How Lawyers Spoil Christmas.....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ulwl_pYLUOE&feature=related

(BTW...you have to stay to the final line here)