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 (except maybe in Japan) 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 there is at least one
good child in each. Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with,
thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming
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 stocking, 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 onto 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.
The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting elements. Assuming that
each child gets nothing more than a medium sized LEGO set (two pounds), the
sleigh is carrying over 500 thousands tons, no counting Santa himself. On
land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting
that the "flying" reindeer can pull 10 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). 600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates
enormous air resistance - this would heat up reindeer in the same fashion as a
spacecraft reentering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would
adsorb 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 4.2 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 seconds, would be subjected to acceleration forces
of 17,000 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 either has been using som sort of advanced
E-Mail Transporter or is dead now ,
Merry Christmas
|