- 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.
- 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.
- 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 75.5 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.
- 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.
- 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 probably dead now.