Christmas science (yoinked from a forum)
1. There are approximately 2 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. At an average (census)rate of 3.5 children per house, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming that there is at least one good child in each.
2. Santa has about 31 hours of Xmas to work with thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth assuming he travels east to west. 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 .001 seconds to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute remaining gifts under the ,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 108,000,000 stops is evenly distributed round the earth (which is false but we'll accept for calculation purposes), we are now talking about .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 x the speed of sound. For the purposes of comparision the fastest man made vehicle, the ulysses space probe moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run fastest at 15mph.
3. The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized lego set (2lbs.), the sleigh is carring over 1,000,000,000 lbs.not counting himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that the "flying reindeer could pull 10x the normal amount, the job can't be done with eight or even nine (Rudolph) of them- Santa would need 360,000 of them. this increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh- another 108,000,000 lbs. or roughly 7x the weight of the Queen Elizabeth ship.
4. 1,200,000,000 pounds traveling at 650 mpSecond creates enormous air resistance -- this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a space ship re-entering the atomosphere. 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, explosing the reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within .00426 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.second in .001 seconds would be subjected to centrifugal forces of 17,500 g's. A 250 lb. Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 lbs. of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo.
5. Therefore, if santa did exist, he's dead now.
2. Santa has about 31 hours of Xmas to work with thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth assuming he travels east to west. 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 .001 seconds to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute remaining gifts under the ,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 108,000,000 stops is evenly distributed round the earth (which is false but we'll accept for calculation purposes), we are now talking about .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 x the speed of sound. For the purposes of comparision the fastest man made vehicle, the ulysses space probe moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run fastest at 15mph.
3. The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized lego set (2lbs.), the sleigh is carring over 1,000,000,000 lbs.not counting himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that the "flying reindeer could pull 10x the normal amount, the job can't be done with eight or even nine (Rudolph) of them- Santa would need 360,000 of them. this increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh- another 108,000,000 lbs. or roughly 7x the weight of the Queen Elizabeth ship.
4. 1,200,000,000 pounds traveling at 650 mpSecond creates enormous air resistance -- this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a space ship re-entering the atomosphere. 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, explosing the reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within .00426 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.second in .001 seconds would be subjected to centrifugal forces of 17,500 g's. A 250 lb. Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 lbs. of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo.
5. Therefore, if santa did exist, he's dead now.