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- No known species of reindeer can fly, but there are
300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified.
While most of these are insects and germs, this does not
COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever
seen.
- There are 2 billion children in the world (persons under
18), but since Santa doesn't (appear) to handle Muslim, Hindu,
Jewish, or Buddhist children, that reduces the workload by 85%
of the total - leaving 378 million according to the Population
Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children
per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there
is at least one good child per house.
- Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to
the different times 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 stocking, 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 75.5 million miles, not
counting stops to do what most of us do at least once every 31
hours, plus feeding, etc. That 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, at
tops, 15 miles per hour.
- The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting
element. Assuming 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 the "flying reindeer" can pull
TEN TIMES that normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight,
or even nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases 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 II.
- 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 will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy
per second, each. In short, they will burst into flames almost
instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and
creating a deafening sonic boom in their wake. The entire
reindeer team will be vaporized in 4.26 thousandths of a
second. Santa meanwhile, will be subject 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 the
sleigh by a 4,315,015 pound force.
In conclusion, if Santa ever DID deliver presents of
Christmas Eve, he's now dead. (This will be something you can
tell your kids someday!)
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