SANTA CLAUS: An Engineer's Perspective
I.
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.

II.
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 house-
hold; 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.

III.

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).

IV.

600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second crates
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 650 m.p.s. in .001 seconds,
would be subjected to centrifugal 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.

V.

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

What if you where to have multipul Santas? What would be the minimum for it to work?

Edit : Made it readable.

[This message has been edited by Necron_With_Bionics (edited 12-24-2002).]

i must have seen this posted 3 times already. get over it, santa isn't real.

This has been posted several times, we don't need it again.