Consider the following:
1) 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.
2) 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.
3) 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 75-1/2 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.
4) 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.
5) 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 dead now.
