Santas busy night

[Uncle Kram]

1) So far no scientist has been able to find a reindeer that can fly. But then there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified so this doesn’t rule out the flying reindeer, even though most of these are insects and germs. May be Santa can clarify this with us someday as he is the only one to see the super reindeer.

2) There are 2 billion children who are under 18 in the world. But as Santa doesn’t look into children of other religions, his work load (which is the distribution of presents, remember elves are there to make them!) is reduced to 15% of the total. That is 378 million according to the Population Reference Bureau. The census has shown an average of 3.5 children per house, that’s 91.8 million homes. One presumes there’s at least one good child in each. Bless the rest!

3) Thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the Earth, Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with. We are assuming that he travels east to west. We of course have the benefit of the doubt that he is a logical thinker.

This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This implies that for every home with good children, Santa has a 1/1000th of a second to do his Christmas duty(ies). So within a 1/1000th of a second he has to park, hop out of the sleigh, slide down the chimney (with his belly that shakes like a bowl full of jelly), fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat cookies, drink the milk, climb up the chimney, jump 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 (though the assumption is completely false, we accept it to make our life easier), this comes to 0.78 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.

This means that Santa’s sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. It is important to note that the conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour, but of course we have to keep in mind that Santa’s reindeers are of a special kind.

4) Another interesting element is the payload on the sleigh. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons. This is not counting Santa, who is invariably overweight and is yet to consider the Atkins low carb diets.

A conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds, on land. Even granting that ‘flying reindeer’ is able to pull ten times the normal amount, it is impossible to do the job with eight, or even nine. Therefore 214,200 reindeers are needed. This increases the payload – not even counting the weight of the sleigh – to 353,430 tons.

5) A huge amount of air resistance is created when 353,000 tons is traveling at 650 miles per second. The first pair of the reindeer will absorb 14.3 quintrillion joules of energy per second per reindeer. Which will heat up the reindeers instantaneously and burst them into flames exposing the next pair whilst creating a deafening sonic boom in their wake. Within 4.26 thousands of a second the entire reindeer team will be vaporized.

Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500 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.