Terry Samuel wrote:

> 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 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.
>
> 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 did exist, he's dead now.
>
> --
> Never take life seriously. Nobody gets out alive anyway.
>                             -- Anonymous --