Humor The Physics of Santa /Santas carbon footprint

garyw

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Seemed apt to post this......


  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 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.

And.......

According to Ethical Ocean, Santa’s carbon footprint for his annual trip around the world to deliver presents comes to 69.7 million metric tons, with those toys being the biggest contributor to his footprint. That is more than the annual carbon footprint of the entire country of Ireland (60.3 million tons)!



 
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garyw

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I just hope Santa gets checked out on reindeer each year - i.e. take off with one reindeer out sort of stuff.
 

Artlav

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All it takes is a time machine. Then he can spend years delivering the presents at a reasonable rate by always going back in time at the end of the night.
No wonder he takes a year's worth of vacation.
 

Pipcard

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No, the reindeer (or the sleigh) contain a time-distortion field that slows down time.
 

HAL9001

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IT'S EASY:
there are 1000000santas - that makes only a 1000 hopuses per santa wic is possible....
 

N_Molson

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Wow, Santa seems to have a decisive technological supremacy ! That super-resistant ablative red layer of paint would certainly interest a lot of people out there.

I don't think he is overweight, though. This is just because the life support & super-anti-G systems of his suit are located in front of the belly. Mere matter of convenience. It would be interesting to analyse a patch of the suit fabric. It has to have extremely interesting thermodynamic properties.

Notice that the skids under the sleigh suggest an interplanetary travel capability, making the vehicle able to land (probably in a VTOL fashion) on any kind of more-or-less solid terrain.

The raindeers have to be cooled with something very cold. I guess they have liquid hydrogen running through their veins. The horns act as radiators.

Edit : that pic was taken from the ISS this Week-End. I think they caught him in action :

25comet400300.jpg
 
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