| Children have been asking
for years Who Is Santa? Just last week my 6 year old neighbor asked me, Who Is Santa
Clause? I wasn't sure what to say so I went online and typed in "Who Is Santa Clause"
and below are the results I got so I thought I would share them.
An Engineers View of Santa
Clause
No known species
of reindeer can fly. BUT there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be
classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY
rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.
There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. BUT since Santa
doesn't (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that
reduces the workload to 15% of the total - 378 million according to Population
Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that's
91.8 million homes. One presumes there's at least one good child in each.
Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and
the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical).
This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian
household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the
sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents
under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get
back into the sleigh and move on to the next house.
Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the
earth (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our
calculations we will accept), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household, a
total trip of 71.604 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do
at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding etc.
This means that 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 on earth,
the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second - a conventional
reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.
The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child
gets nothing more than a medium-sized Lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying
321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On
land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that
"flying reindeer" (see point #1) could pull TEN TIMES the normal amount, we cannot
do the job with eight, or even nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the
payload - not even counting the weight of the sleigh - to 353,430 tons. Again, for
comparison - this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.
353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance -
this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecraft's re-entering the
earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of
energy per second each. In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously,
exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake.
The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second.
Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater
than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to
the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.
In conclusion -
If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's been vaporized by now;
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