Posted By teaboy
According to figures published by the Population Reference Bureau, there are approximately two billion children (persons under 1) in the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist religions, this reduces Santa’s workload for Christmas night to approximately 15% of the total, or 300 million. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that comes to about 86 million homes for Santa to visit on Christmas night; presuming that there is at least one good child in each household!
Thanks to the different time zones and the anti-clockwise rotation of the earth, Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with. This works out to be about 770 households per second. This means that for each Christian household with a good child, Santa has around 8 thousandths of a second (0.008 seconds) to arrive at the house, park his sleigh, hop out, 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 his sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming that each of the 86 million stops is evenly distributed around the area of the earth’s land mass (which of course we know is false, but is something that we will accept for the purposes of our calculations), we are now talking about 0.7 miles between each household; giving a total trip of more than 60 million miles (not including ocean crossings). That means that Santa's sleigh has to travel at more than 500 miles per second, or approximately mach 2,500 (2,500 times the speed of sound). For purposes of comparison, the conventional reindeer can run (at best) about 15 miles per hour (0.004 miles per second/mach 0.02).
The payload of Santa’s sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized Lego set (about one kilogram in weight), the sleigh will be carrying a staggering 300 thousand tonnes, not counting Santa himself! On land, the average reindeer can pull no more than about 130 kilograms. Even assuming that the "flying" reindeer, with far less resistance, could pull ten times this amount, the job cannot be done with eight or even nine reindeer. In fact, Santa would need more than 230,000 of them. Guessing that the average reindeer weighs about 150kg, this increases the airborne payload by another 35,000 tonnes, or roughly five times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth cruise ship.
Almost 350 thousand tonnes travelling at 500 miles per second would create an enormous amount of friction due to air resistance. This would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a space shuttle re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The leading pair of reindeer would each absorb more than 900 Terra (1015) joules of energy per second (900 Terra Watts). 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 vaporised within 4.26 thousandths of a second (0.00426 seconds), or right about the time Santa was half way towards the first house on his trip. Not that it matters much, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 500 miles per second in less than 8 thousandths of a second, would be subjected to forces of more than 10 million times his own body weight (10 million g’s). A 100kg Santa (which seems very slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by more than 10,000 Mega Newtons of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a pulp.
Therefore, if Santa did exist, he’s dead now. MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!