From: Rodgers Moore (rodgers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
Date: Fri Dec 21 2001 - 18:33:14 GMT-3
Classic and funny, Thank you very much and Merry Christmas.
BUT, I have a couple of questions. Wouldn't Santa have to accelerate from 0 to
1300mps in .0005 seconds? Isn't 650mps the average speed? So the g's would be
much higher (I forget the calculation), like closer to 70,000 g's
I apologize, the engineer in me had to ask. :)))
Rodgers Moore
"Virnoche, Phil" wrote:
> > Why I Don't Believe in Santa Claus,........
> > 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
> > household, 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 to 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.
> > .......Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.
> > Thank You,
> >
> > Philip G. Virnoche CCNP
> > Sr. Network Engineer - (the late) AT&T Fixed Wireless
> > phone: 425.580.5239
> > cell: 206.601.3134
> > "Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes.That
> > way, when you criticize them, you are a mile away from them ...and you
> > have their shoes."
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