Now, the old timers will remember this one, but since we have a few newcommers, I thought it'd be funny to see where it leads this year... Last year turned out to be somewhat of a "thread spam monster" which most my posts tend to lead to... Oh well, with fear of sounding too cliché.
Here we go again.
Next time someone asks you, if Santa really eksist's (this is just a way to rephrase, that you obviously want to know) the answer can be found based on the following calculations.
1. There are aproximately 2 billion kids ( people under 18 ) on this planet. Meanwhile Santa doesn't have to visit muslims, hindues, jews or buddhists, which reduces the ammount to 15%, or 378 million. With a world average of 3.5 kids a houshold, this means there are 108 million housholds he must visit, as we assume there is atleast one good child a house.
2. Santa has, because of the worlds different timezones and rotation, aproximately 31 hours to do the job, as we assume he travels from east to west, which would be the logical thing to do. This in turn, means he must visit 957,7 housholds a second. This means that for every Christian houshold, with a good child, Santa has about 1/1.000 second to park the sleigh, jump out and down the chimney, fill the stockings hanging over the fireplace, place the rest of the gifts under the tree, eat the candy that's been laid out for him, crawl back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh and continiue onto the next house.
As we assume that every houshold that must be visitet is evenly destributed (which we know they aren't but we will assume it for mathematical reasons) there will be around 1km. between every houshold on average. This gives him a combined trip of 100km in which toilet visits and cofee breaks are not included. This means that Santa's sleigh must travel with a speed of aproximately 1.000km a second, or 3.000 times the speed of sound. As a comparison, the fastest human made vehichle, the space pod Ulysses, flies at around 50km a second. Besides, a conventional raindeer will only ever reach a top speed of 30km an hour.
3. The cargo is another interesting aspect. If we assume every good child at minimum will be recieving a large LEGO play set (1kg) the sleigh must carry over 500.000 tons of cargo. Santa not included. On land, your average raindeer can only pull up to 200kg. Even if we assume that these special flying raindeer can carry up to 10 times their normal capacity, this cannot be done with 8 or 9 - Santa's sleigh would need 360.000 raindeer. This, together with the presents, would bring the total weigh of the sleigh up to 600.000 tons.
4. 600.000 tons, which moves at 1.000km a second will create an enormous resistance. This will in turn heat the sleigh and raindeer in the same way as a meteor, that enters the earths atmosphere. The two lead-raindeer will absorb an energy of 14.300 trillion joule a second, or 14.300 trillion watt.
The two lead-raindeer will simply put, combust and burn up instantly, and the raindeer behind them will at first be exposed to the sonic-boom, and then in turn burn up themselves. The entire raindeer pack would be gone in 4.26 seconds, eg. when Santa reaches the 5th house.
This is of course irrelevant, for as the sleigh accelerates from 0 to 1.000km a second, the entire sleigh will be exposed to a gravitational force 17.500 times greater than gravity. A Santa of 150kg (weight based on eksisting picture material) would be slammed to the back of the sleigh with a force equalling 3 million kg, which would instantly crush every bone in his body, transforming him into a giant puddle of splat!
5. The conclusion is therefore, that if Santa ever eksisted, he's dead now!
Merry Christmas!
Tm
Claus
