(I did convert this to Metric a while ago, but I lost the file - Alex)
I. There are approximately
two billion children (persons under 18) in the world. However, since Santa
does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, 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 house hold, that comes to 108 million homes,
presuming that there is at least one good child in each.
II. 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 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
stops 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, 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 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.
III. 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 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, by another
54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the
ship, not the monarch).
IV. 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 m.p.s.
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.
V. Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.
Merry Christmas!