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SANTA FACT

bigblue

By bigblue
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bigblue Senior SS Member

bigblue

Posted
Posted

There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18)

in the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of

Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist (except maybe in Japan)

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 household, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming

that there at least one good child in each.

 

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.

 

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, another

54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the

Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch).

 

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 reentering 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 acceleration 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.

 

Merry Christmas.

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zippy *Elite SS Member*

zippy

Posted
Posted

only skimmed over the large amount of typing there. :wtf: lol. on the other hand, santa didn't bring me any of what i asked for this year. either i was bad, his sliegh broke down, or he's........ nah, i was just bad.

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