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Geek Culture / Santa Claus - An Engineer's Perspective

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Clonkex
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Location: Northern Tablelands, NSW, Australia
Posted: 4th Jan 2015 08:24
[DISCLAIMER: I didn't write this. Dad found it. Thought it was highly amusing.]

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 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 house hold, 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 purpose of the calculations), we are now talking about 1.3 km per household; a total trip of 125.83 million km, not counting bathroom stops or breaks. This means Santa’s sleigh is moving at 1083 km/s, 3000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at poky 45.7 km per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 25 km/h - or 6.9 metres per second.

The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium size Lego set ( 0.906 kg, that is), the sleigh is carrying over 508,000 tonnes, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 136 kg. Even granting that the “flying” reindeer could pull ten times the normal amount, the job can’t be done with only 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 54,864 tonnes, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch).

606,600 tonnes travelling at 1083 km per second creates enormous air resistance, and 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 in 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 thousands of a second (0.00426 s), 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 1083 km/s in 0.001 seconds, would be subjected to acceleration forces of 17,500 g’s. A 113 kg Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 195,470 kg 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!

Dark Java Dude 64
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Location: Neither here nor there nor anywhere
Posted: 4th Jan 2015 10:11
Well everyone knows he just uses a time machine.

This is pretty funny. Especially the bit where he gets only to the first 4 or 5 houses.

Clonkex
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Posted: 4th Jan 2015 12:55
Quote: "Well everyone knows he just uses a time machine."


lol

Quote: "This is pretty funny. Especially the bit where he gets only to the first 4 or 5 houses."


Indeed hehe

BatVink
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Location: Gods own County, UK
Posted: 5th Jan 2015 10:01
All this just proves that Santa is indeed magic.

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur
easter bunny
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Playing: Dota 2
Posted: 5th Jan 2015 23:17 Edited at: 5th Jan 2015 23:19
I always knew Santa wasn't real. I had proof. I knew that Santa lived at the North Pole, and I knew that the North Pole was on Pluto*. I also knew that there is a vacuum in space.
Therefore Santa couldn't possibly exist because he would die while in transit from his place to Earth! He would explode!

*I believe this is where my logic failed me, but you can't blame a six year old for getting North Pole and North Star mixed up can you?


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Clonkex
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Posted: 6th Jan 2015 00:07
Quote: "*I believe this is where my logic failed me, but you can't blame a six year old for getting North Pole and North Star mixed up can you?"


lol

Quik
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Posted: 6th Jan 2015 02:08
Quote: "Well everyone knows he just uses a time machine."

Well, considering that science as of yet has deemed time machines impossible, unless you, again, want to die a horrible death.. so either way he's dead now ^^



Whose eyes are those eyes?
Dark Java Dude 64
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Posted: 6th Jan 2015 03:44
Quote: "Well, considering that science as of yet has deemed time machines impossible, unless you, again, want to die a horrible death.. so either way he's dead now ^^"
He uses a time machine from the future... Duh...

Clonkex
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Location: Northern Tablelands, NSW, Australia
Posted: 6th Jan 2015 05:00
Quote: "He uses a time machine from the future... Duh..."


Well obviously...

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