Almost facts on Santa
Kelly Parker (r13867@EMAIL.SPS.MOT.COM)
Thu, 17 Dec 1998 13:08:31 -0700
Merry Christmas and a Joyous New Year to "the Roundtable that never
ends"--
Santa's Sleigh, Mrs Claus' cookies and true (well, almost true) facts...
Editor's Note:
We asked the elves at the North Pole to do several mathematical
computations regarding flight speed, physics, number of visits and what
makes all this possible for Santa's yearly adventure. They also included
a little extra information.
The elves proudly presented the following write up. You'll have
to forgive them...their sense of mathematics and grasp of physics falls
somewhat short of flawless.
FROM THE ELVES AT THE NORTH POLE --
There are approximately 378 million children (persons under 18)
in the world. 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 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 household with a good child, Santa has
around 1/1000 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, unless of course they have consumed mass quantities of
Mrs. Claus' cookies which pack quite the punch.
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, which he resides at 250 pounds (hmmm...that
can't be right). On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than
300 pounds, even a conventional very scared reindeer at best could pull
305.45 pounds, but Santa's reindeer are trained and ready for business.
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).
600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air
resistance -- this would heat up conventional reindeer in the same
fashion as a spacecraft reentering the earth's atmosphere causing an
awkward flying anomaly that would be visually spectacular for around 4
seconds. The lead pair of reindeer absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of
energy per second each. In short, they would burst into flames almost
instantaneously if it were not for Mrs. Claus' cookies. If conventional
reindeer were used 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.
Also, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop 650 m.p.s. in
.001 seconds, Santa is subjected to centrifugal forces of 17,500 g's. A
250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) is pinned to the back of
the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force, which would instantly crush
your average Santa impersonator. All this would not be possible without
Mrs. Claus' cookies which make everything work well. Poor Santa...it
sounds like he's saying "Ho! Ho! Ho! " but now we know it's
"SLOW...SLOW...SLOW!"
Therefore, this proves that we must work on making those cookies!
--
YiS--
Kelly Parker (from the Motorola web page, my employer)
Firebird District Cub Roundtable Commissioner
SM,Troop 110 CM, Pack 43(retired)
Grand Canyon Council Wipala Wiki Lodge #432
Phoenix, AZ "and a good ol' Eagle, too..." W-CS-41
