The science of Santa Claus

[Horton]

        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 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 that there is at least one good child in each.

        Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different timezones and the rotation of the Earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This calculates 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 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 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. 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, 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 each childgets nothing more than a medium sized Lego set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying over 500,000 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 can't be done with eight or even nine of them --Santa would need 360,000 of them. This increases the payload another 54,000 tons, not counting the weight of the sleigh, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch). Five hundred - fifty four thousand (554,000) tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance. The reindeer would heat up 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. In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in theirwake.

        The entire team of reindeer 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 miles per second in .001 seconds, would be subjected to centrifugal forces of 17,500 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.

[eleeski]

I'm glad this is members only. I wouldn't want Kirk to see this information. I hope you didn't get it from Wikipedia.

Eric

[Horton]

Could you check the math for me ?

[lkb]

there went my hope for a Warp 7/vanillaforum/js/tinymce/jscripts/tiny_mce/plugins/emotions/images/smiley-frown.gif

Merry Christmas/happy holidays to everyone!

[skidawg]

 Looks like someone didn't get what they wanted for Christmas,  If you had kids jth you wouldn't have the time to even look all that up!