AN ENGINEER SPEAKS ON CHRISTMAS
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*LITTLE KNOWN FACTS ABOUT SANTA*-
1) No known species of reindeer
can fly. But it is estimated that 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 seen.
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2) 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 the 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.
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3) 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 purpose of our calculations we will accept), we are now
talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75-1/2 million miles, not counting
stops to do what most of us must do at least every 31 hours, plus feeding and 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, the Ulysses space probe,
moves at a pokey 27.4 miles per second-a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per
hour.
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4) The payload on the sleigh adds another
interesting element. Assuming that each chld 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 the "flying reindeer" (see point number 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.
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5) 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 re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will
absorb 14.3 quintillion jolts of energy, per second, each. In short, they will burst into
flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening
sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team 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 a 4,315,015 pounds of force. In
conclusion-if Santa ever did deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's dead now.
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