Before you hang-up your Christmas stocking this Christmas Eve, just consider this for a moment, but don’t tell the children! Have a wonderful Christmas and a Happy New Year.
“No known species of reindeer can fly. But…
There are 300,000 species of living organism yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not completely rule our flying reindeer, which, one should note, 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 - or 378 million according to the Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that is 91.8 million homes. One would therefore presume that 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-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, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming that each one of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false - but for the purpose of our calculations we will assume & accept) we are now talking about .78 miles per household; thus totalling a round 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 etc.
This means Santa’s sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second - 3000 times the speed of sound. For purpose of comparison, the fastest man made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a pokey 27.4 miles per second - a conventional reindeer can run — tops — at 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 lbs), the sleigh is then carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa (whom is invariably described as overweight). On landing, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 330 pounds. Even granting that “flying reindeer” (see above) could pull Ten Times the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine reindeer. 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! (The vessel - not the Queen!).
So What? 353,430 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates considerable air resistance, commonly known as ‘drag’. ‘Drag’ will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as space craft re-entering earth’s atmosphere. In so doing, the lead pair of reindeer would absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per second. …EACH! In short, they would burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and creating deafening Sonic Booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporised within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, would also be subjected to unfathomable centrifugal forces - 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250lb Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of G-force.”
Comment — “clearly, the writer hasn’t grasped basic Christmas physics; he has not taken into account the 91.8 million mince pies - assuming one bite of 12g — equating to a paltry 1,101 metric tons. And, after knocking back 3.3million bottles of brandy all the above would, naturally, be entirely possible - …or so one would think!”
merry xmas
