Physics of Santa

[jeff]

You might have seen this in years past. If not, here is the analysis from Spy mag in January 1990, as well as a rebuttal.

1. No known species of reindeer can fly. BUT there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.

2. There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. BUT since Santa doesn't (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total -- 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census)rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there's at least one good child in each.

3. Santa has 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 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, 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 of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc. 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 poky 27.4 miles per second -- a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.

4. The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that "flying reindeer" (see point #1) could pull TEN TIMES the normal anoint, 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. Again, for comparison -- this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.

5. 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous 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 flame 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.

In conclusion -- If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's dead now.

=============

A rebuttal:

If you're going to criticise Santa Claus on physical grounds, you may at least do it right.

The payload calculations are nonsense. Adding, say, 1000 stops back at the North Pole for reloading adds only a few percent to the entire distance covered, while reducing the payload by a factor of 1000. This is clearly the way to go.

The nonuniform distribution of children has a tremendous effect on the routing. With sensible routing, the average distance from a good child to the next good child is only a couple hundred feet in suburban conditions (this is clearly higher in the country, but is much less in, say, New York City). With only .05 miles between average good children, Santa need only travel at Mach 200, just a little faster than Ulysses. This reduces the force of air resistance by a factor of 200, and the power absorbed by the reindeer by 3000.

Of course, if Santa stops to give coal to bad children it could slow things down a bit. But it appears that increasing population has made Santa give up that trick. When was the last time you heard of anybody getting a lump of coal?

We all saw the pictures of a smart bomb falling through an Iraqi smokestack. Clearly Santa uses the same technology for toys and chimneys. By dropping, say, 100 toys at a time from high altitude, Santa can reduce his speed by another factor of 10. While still supersonic, this is now slightly less than orbital velocity, sparing Santa and his team the trauma of extreme centrifugal force.

Santa's trip IS a remarkable feat of aeronautics, but please don't say it's impossible.

[CutLass]

What a nice post.
Jeff you are, for certain, one of Santa's good children.

[jeff]

Awwww, gee shucks (blushes). We have a *very* nice tree this year, too. When I was a kid growing up in an apartment and no chimney, I was very worried about how Santa would get in!

[neevel]

It's all really quite simple-- Santa's sleigh is a TARDIS. Thus, he's doing most of his travel & logistics removed from the normal space-time continuum, popping in to n-space at each location for just long enough to make the drop, and able to be at multiple points in n-space at once.

[D+F+P=Hadouken!]

Santa: He bends the laws of physics.

[KoreanFencer]

Santa is magical!!! ^_^

[riptide]

You might have seen this in years past. If not, here is the analysis from Spy mag in January 1990, as well as a rebuttal.

1. No known species of reindeer can fly. BUT there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.

2. There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. BUT since Santa doesn't (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total -- 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census)rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there's at least one good child in each.

3. Santa has 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 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, 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 of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc. 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 poky 27.4 miles per second -- a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.

4. The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that "flying reindeer" (see point #1) could pull TEN TIMES the normal anoint, 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. Again, for comparison -- this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.

5. 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous 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 flame 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.

In conclusion -- If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's dead now.

=============

A rebuttal:

If you're going to criticise Santa Claus on physical grounds, you may at least do it right.

The payload calculations are nonsense. Adding, say, 1000 stops back at the North Pole for reloading adds only a few percent to the entire distance covered, while reducing the payload by a factor of 1000. This is clearly the way to go.

The nonuniform distribution of children has a tremendous effect on the routing. With sensible routing, the average distance from a good child to the next good child is only a couple hundred feet in suburban conditions (this is clearly higher in the country, but is much less in, say, New York City). With only .05 miles between average good children, Santa need only travel at Mach 200, just a little faster than Ulysses. This reduces the force of air resistance by a factor of 200, and the power absorbed by the reindeer by 3000.

Of course, if Santa stops to give coal to bad children it could slow things down a bit. But it appears that increasing population has made Santa give up that trick. When was the last time you heard of anybody getting a lump of coal?

We all saw the pictures of a smart bomb falling through an Iraqi smokestack. Clearly Santa uses the same technology for toys and chimneys. By dropping, say, 100 toys at a time from high altitude, Santa can reduce his speed by another factor of 10. While still supersonic, this is now slightly less than orbital velocity, sparing Santa and his team the trauma of extreme centrifugal force.

Santa's trip IS a remarkable feat of aeronautics, but please don't say it's impossible.

Don't forget, there is no spoon...

[ReverseLunge]

The Legacy of Child Abuse


The degree to which values and ideals are handed down from parents to children is well accepted, even in popular culture. Thus the phrase "ego-children" emerges to describe children that are raised so that they satisfy the ego of their parents, affirming the values and ideals that the parents consider to be part of their self-image. Though parental imprinting of children is widespread and even encouraged, it will only be until later in this century that certain aspects of imprinting will be correctly understood as constituting child abuse.

A child is naturally accepting of the world. Generally anything said or done by parents is considered sane, normal, and correct to the child. Thus parents who crusade to brainwash their children into clones of themselves will generally receive no resistance in their quest to impose religious, political, or cultural values upon an open and impressionable mind. A child is typically given these ideas by their parents and as an adult will defend them as truth -- not for rational reasons, but because that is what they were told to believe as children.

When confronted by this, most people will quickly assert that this does not apply to them because they have a few different ideas than their parents, though they seem unable to recognize or understand that on the whole they are a result of their genetic and environmental conditioning even if some superficial differences exist. It is only the rare cases where a child has a strong independent spirit and is raised with respect for its autonomy that something new can emerge. Even then, the child will inevitably be colored in some ways as a result of its parents.

The serious problems begin emerging when parents do not honor that a child is a blank slate of new possibilities but instead want to create clones of themselves to serve a static order. A child saddled with their parents' political dogma, delusional reality (e.g. an anthropomorphized god, heaven, resurrection, holiness, sin), and general misconceptions about life may be led so far astray that they will never be able to taste truth as an adult. Whether not knowing any better or being arrogantly self-congratulatory about their perceived independence, they are likely to perpetuate the abuse they suffered as they indoctrinate their own children in the same erroneous beliefs.

Nature generates new life and kills old life so that new possibilities always have a chance of coming into the world. Adults are the stagnant form of children, proven best by how adults rarely have new ideas, sustained inspiration, or demonstrate any significant capacity for growth or creativity while children have these qualities in abundance. Though an adult's envy and lost hope account for much of the praise of a child's infinite potential and persistently fresh outlook, many adults take pride in mentioning the distinction that they are steady in character and routine. Somehow they take credit for this as if it was a deliberate choice on their part rather than a spiritual defect that grew over time into a cancerous existential inertia that keeps them entrapped.

At a certain age, a child discovers that monsters in the closet, Santa Claus, and the Tooth Fairy are only imaginary beings. Though these may be socially popular and commercially represented, eventually children will intuitively sense that adults do not take these things seriously and their existence will be questioned. We all have memories of when we discovered these lies and we know that children reflect on what they know of the world and consider whether these beings are real or merely socially accepted lies that serve some other purpose.

Children are much smarter than they are given credit for. A child eventually recognizes that he has never actually seen a monster in his closet, not been harmed by or even spoken to one, and though all of these are theoretically possible, it is more likely that the idea of monsters is a popular fabrication. Likewise, the story of Santa Claus seems not only improbable, but also nonsensical. The idea of elves toiling in a far away workshop that has never been witnessed and can never be visited seems suspect. Similarly, a sleigh supposedly led through the air by flying reindeer and an omniscient but benevolent jolly man in a red suit appears absurd on its face and lacks any credible counterpart in reality. Yet, every year there are millions of children who have been raised to believe the lies and eagerly seek their affirmation, a role which adults are all too happy to play out with costumes, rituals, events, and tall tales so they can keep the illusion alive.

Monsters and Santa Claus are hardly the worst lies that parents teach their children, but they are an example of how a child's trust and innocence are manipulated without consideration for the effects. If the preservation of a child's autonomy is not achieved by breaking the pattern of imprinted dogma, the cycle of abuse will continue unabated. It is essential that parents become aware of the cycle and pledge to not force their children into the role of ego clones.

Nature prospers when it is allowed a fresh start. Consequently it rewards those who are not crippled by fraudulent misconceptions while penalizing the deluded who are forced to suffer for the errors they have chosen or inherited. Humans are the remarkable in that they are the only animals that invent illusions to distance themselves from nature and then take these illusions as truth despite the consequences. Parents owe it to their children and their belief in the potential of the future to not spread more lies disguised as the generous gifts of adult wisdom.

[CutLass]

Originally Posted by riptide

Don't forget, there is no spoon...

Huh?
why would we expect a spoon?

[Hurriranger]

Originally Posted by CutLass

Huh?
why would we expect a spoon?

the matrix, watch it!

[cornflower]

My mother did SUCH a good job of convincing me that there was a Santa. I was teased by all the other Deaf kids at school about it, but I refused to believe them because I thought my mother would NEVER lie to me. My mother finally told me when I was 12, and I was all "Huh..." I was very disappointed, but I didn't cry. I got over it quickly, but I think it's fun to believe in Santa! Although I think my mother told me a bit too late, I think she should have told me earlier .

[SwordSoul]

RL, do you feel that these "lies" are sheerly the fault of the parent/culture? The parents didn't create the monsters in the closet--it seems to me that the time to "reveal" santa would be about the time the child can figure out that sort of thing. It would seem to me that the child believes in monsters because he/she hasn't equated lack of experience as a qualifier for percieved non-existence? However, point taken about the "approving lies and fallacy" stuff. (where is this essay from? yours?)

we could blow the doors open and turn this into a religion/culture/power/developmental stages yadayadayada debate, but let's keep this one light, i'm printing the Santa Physics stuff! i've never seen that before! funny!

LTJska4life: Yo what's up?
Punkfencer: Merry christmachanakwanzamukah, b*tches!

[KShan5[PrFC]]

Originally Posted by SwordSoul

RL, do you feel that these "lies" are sheerly the fault of the parent/culture? The parents didn't create the monsters in the closet--it seems to me that the time to "reveal" santa would be about the time the child can figure out that sort of thing. It would seem to me that the child believes in monsters because he/she hasn't equated lack of experience as a qualifier for percieved non-existence? However, point taken about the "approving lies and fallacy" stuff. (where is this essay from? yours?)

we could blow the doors open and turn this into a religion/culture/power/developmental stages yadayadayada debate, but let's keep this one light, i'm printing the Santa Physics stuff! i've never seen that before! funny!

LTJska4life: Yo what's up?
Punkfencer: Merry christmachanakwanzamukah, b*tches!

General Rule: We don't respond to ReverseLunge.

[SwordSoul]

(requisite letters and then some)

[scrapinpeg]

just another cut-and-paste by RL, from http://www.datejesus.com/sermons/mini/mini5.html

[Bokken]

That's a very interesting website.

A shame on you, RL, for your plagarism!