Berkswolf
21st December 2001, 04:09 PM
There are about 2 billion children (people under 18 in the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or Jewish religions, this reduces the workload for Christmas Night to 15% of the total, or 378 million. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, which comes to 108 million homes, presuming that 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 he travels east to west (which seems logical).
This works out to 967.7 visits per second. This is easy to say that for each Christian household with a good child, Santa has to 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 are 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 75.7 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 the purpose of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle moves at only 27.4 miles per second and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) at 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 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 couldn'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, another 54,000 tons, or roughly 7 times of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch).
600,000 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates enormous airresistance-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 reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousands of a second, or right about the time Santa reached his fifth house on his trip.
Not that that matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650 miles per second, in .001 seconds, would be subjected to forces of 17,500 g's. A 250 lb Santa would be pinned to the back of his 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.
Science or Santa? You decide. :)
This works out to 967.7 visits per second. This is easy to say that for each Christian household with a good child, Santa has to 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 are 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 75.7 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 the purpose of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle moves at only 27.4 miles per second and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) at 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 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 couldn'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, another 54,000 tons, or roughly 7 times of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch).
600,000 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates enormous airresistance-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 reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousands of a second, or right about the time Santa reached his fifth house on his trip.
Not that that matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650 miles per second, in .001 seconds, would be subjected to forces of 17,500 g's. A 250 lb Santa would be pinned to the back of his 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.
Science or Santa? You decide. :)