Before you read this, I should first say, Merry Christmas.
Now read on.......
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 1/1000 th 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 element.
Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized
LEGO set(two pounds), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousands
tons, not 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 the reindeer in the same
fashion as a spacecraft reentering 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 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's dead now.
Merry Christmas
So i Guess their goes my present from santa of a new hood or tonnau cover
for the 'B'
Merry Christmas everybody from down under
Neil
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