Santa Claus: An Engineer's Perspective

Since I haven't posted in a very long time, I thought that maybe I should post something humours. My Physics teacher gave us this... (that is who you should thank/blame)

WARNING: If you believe that Santa exists, do not read farther!

There are approximately 1.74 billion children (15 years of age and younger) in the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, or Buddhist religions, this reduces the workload for Christmas night to about 38% of the total, or 660 million.

Santa has about 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 3000 visits/second, assuming two children per home. This is to say that for each Christmas household with a good child, Santa has about 1/3000th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, 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 330 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purpose of our calculations), we are now talking about 0.8 mile between homes; a 11,830 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a pokey 27.4 mi/s, and a conventional reindeer can run 15 mi/h.

The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child receives two pounds worth of gifts, the sleigh is carring over 660,000 tons. On land, a reindeer could pull as much as 300 pounds. Even granting that the "flying" reindeer could pull ten times the normal amount, the job cannot be done with eight or even nine of them - Santa would need 440,000 of them! The entire load, including the reindeer, weigh 726,000 tons or roughly sixteen times the weight of the Titanic!

In addition, 726,000 tons traveling at 2370 mi/s 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 absorb 186 quintillion J/s 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 3 ten-thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa reached the second house on his trip. Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 4740 mi/s in 0.00017 second, would be subjected to centrifugal forces of 4.6 billion g's. A 250 pound Santa would be pined to the back of the sleigh by 1.14 trillion pounds of force (that is, if the sleigh had sufficient structural integrity to withstand the acceleration - which is ludicrous!), instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing hm to a quivering blob of pink goo.

Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.