Santa Claus is world renown for giving out presents to children all over the planet. Now there are approximately two billion children in the world. However, since Santa does not visit every child in the world, a conservative estimate of those who are good reduces the workload for Christmas night to 15% of the total, or 378 million. At an average rate of 3.5 children per house hold, 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 time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming that he travels from east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 967.7 visits per second or 1 every 1/1000th of a second.
The sum total distance traveled from house to house (with an average distance from each house being about .78 miles) leaves a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stops or breaks. This means Santa's sleigh is moving at a staggering 650 miles per second -- approximately 3,000 times the speed of sound.
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 350 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 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.
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 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 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 miles per second in .001 seconds, would be subjected to forces of 17,500 Gs. 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 all of his bones and internal organs.
Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.
1 comment:
Did you figure this out yourself? If not, you need to cite your source to avoid plagiarism, or I will be forced to turn you in. If so, I am both impressed by your thoroughness and terrified by your amount of free time.
It's a sad story either way--I bet you hate babies, puppies, and springtime too...
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