ReFuSeD!
11/14/04, 09:32 PM
Last year, towards the end of one of my physics leftures, we briefly touched on the thought of Santa delivering presents to all the children in the world overnight. It's all pretty amusing...
Taking a conservative number, there are roughly 2 billion people in the world who are under 18 for Santa to deliver presents to. Ofcourse, Santa doesn't deliver presents to children who don't believe in him (this includes many main religions), which greatly reduced his workload. Taking these numbers into account, Santa has roughly 380 million children to deliver presents to. On average, there is 3.5 children per household, leaving roughly 100 million homes for Santa to visit (assume there is atleast one good child per home). Because of different time zones, Santa has 31 hours to complete his trip which forces him to make around 850 visits per second.
In other words, 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 househould is evenly distributed around the world (obviously they're not), there is .78 miles between houses. This works out to a total trip of about 78 million miles within 31 hours (also assuming Santa doesn't stop to take a shit and piss after all those cookies and milk). 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 on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a pokey 27.4 miles per second - a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.
Now consider the huge load in the sleigh! Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (almost 1 kg or 2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, non-flying reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that "flying reindeer" 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.
353,000 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates enourmous air resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecrafts re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules 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 vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, 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 4,315,015 pounds of force.
If, by some chance, Santa could defy these laws of physics, his speed would be so great that he would leave create a force strong enough to disrupt the rotation of the Earth - causing massive tidal waves strong enough to wipe out much of civilization.
Taking a conservative number, there are roughly 2 billion people in the world who are under 18 for Santa to deliver presents to. Ofcourse, Santa doesn't deliver presents to children who don't believe in him (this includes many main religions), which greatly reduced his workload. Taking these numbers into account, Santa has roughly 380 million children to deliver presents to. On average, there is 3.5 children per household, leaving roughly 100 million homes for Santa to visit (assume there is atleast one good child per home). Because of different time zones, Santa has 31 hours to complete his trip which forces him to make around 850 visits per second.
In other words, 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 househould is evenly distributed around the world (obviously they're not), there is .78 miles between houses. This works out to a total trip of about 78 million miles within 31 hours (also assuming Santa doesn't stop to take a shit and piss after all those cookies and milk). 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 on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a pokey 27.4 miles per second - a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.
Now consider the huge load in the sleigh! Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (almost 1 kg or 2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, non-flying reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that "flying reindeer" 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.
353,000 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates enourmous air resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecrafts re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules 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 vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, 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 4,315,015 pounds of force.
If, by some chance, Santa could defy these laws of physics, his speed would be so great that he would leave create a force strong enough to disrupt the rotation of the Earth - causing massive tidal waves strong enough to wipe out much of civilization.