How far and fast does Santa have to travel?
1) No known species of reindeer can fly. BUT there are 300,000
species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most
of these are insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule
out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.
2) There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world.
BUT since Santa doesn't (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu,
Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15%
of the total - 378 million according to Population Reference
Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household,
that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there's at least one
good child in each.
3) Santa has 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 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each
Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of
a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney,
fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the
tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the
chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house.
Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly
distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be
false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept),
we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip
of 75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of
us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc.
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 on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves
at a poky 27.4 miles per second - a conventional reindeer can run,
tops, 15 miles per hour.
4) The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element.
Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized
lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not
counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On
land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds.
Even granting that "flying reindeer" (see point #1) could pull
TEN TIMES the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight,
or even nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the
payload - not even counting the weight of the sleigh - to
353,430 tons. Again, for comparison - this is four times the
weight of the Queen Elizabeth.
5) 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates
enormous air resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in
the same fashion as spacecraft re-entering the earth's
atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3
QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per second. Each. In short,
they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing
the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms
in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized
within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will
be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater
than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously
slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015
pounds of force.
In conclusion - If Santa ever DID deliver presents on
Christmas Eve, he's dead now.
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