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This is not for small children: Engineers Take the Fun out of Christmas
Stan
Registered Users Posts: 1,077 Major grins
This came from Canada, so I am sure some of you have seen it, but it made me laugh so I thought I ought to share. I was going to post it in the machinery thread with its detailed egineering bent...
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, which comes to
108 million homes, presuming there is at least 1 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 on to 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
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 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
travelling 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 adsorb 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/second in .001 seconds, would be subjected to
acceleration forces of 17,000 g's. A 250 pound Santa (which seems
ludicrously slim 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 his bones and organs and
reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo. Therefore, if Santa did exist,
he's dead now.
Merry Christmas & Happy Chanukah too all
May 2007 bring you HEALTH, the rest you have to work for.
Stan
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, which comes to
108 million homes, presuming there is at least 1 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 on to 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
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 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
travelling 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 adsorb 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/second in .001 seconds, would be subjected to
acceleration forces of 17,000 g's. A 250 pound Santa (which seems
ludicrously slim 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 his bones and organs and
reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo. Therefore, if Santa did exist,
he's dead now.
Merry Christmas & Happy Chanukah too all
May 2007 bring you HEALTH, the rest you have to work for.
Stan
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