[s-cars] Fw: Subject: Santa De-bunk - NAC

[tblack]

Couldn't resist sending this!



> Subject: Santa De-bunk
>
> Santa Claus:  An Engineer's Perspective
>
> 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 that
> 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 he travels 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
> 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 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--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 could pull ten 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 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 m.p.s. in ..001 seconds, would be subjected to acceleration
> forces of 17,500 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 reducing him to a quivering
> blob of pink goo.
> Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.
>
> Merry Christmas,
>
> Tom
>
> Views expressed in these postings are those of other weirdos and not
> necessarily those of this weirdo.
>