Joined: Sun Feb 16, 2003 7:29 pm
Posts: 10240
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- there are approximately 2 billion children [persons under 18] in the world, however, since santa doesn't visit children of muslim, hindu, shinto, jewish, taoist, krishna or buddhist religions [as eloquently noted by my_name_is_fritz], this reduces the workload for christmas night to approx. 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 approx. 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 ...for each christian household with a good child, santa has approx. 1/1000th of a second to:
- park the sleigh
- hop out
- slide down the chimney
- fill the stockings
- distribute the remaining presents under the tree
- eat whatever snacks have been left for him
- get his fat ass 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 max.
. - the payload of 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 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 reindeer to move the sleigh
. - this increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the queen elizabeth [the ship, not the monarch]
. - 554,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second crates 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 team of 360,000 reindeer would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about the time santa reached the 5th 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 0.001 seconds, would be subjected to 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
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