No known species of reindeer can fly. But there are roughly 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified. While most of these are insects and germs, this does not rule out flying reindeer - though Santa and my uncle Ralph, in his drinking days, are the only people who've ever seen one.
There are two billion children ( small people under the age of 18 ) in the world. But since Santa doesn't (appear to) handle most non-Christian children, that reduces the workload to about 15 per cent of the total (roughly 378 million according to the Population Reference Bureau). At a rate of say, 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there's at least one good kid 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 to west. That's 822.6 visits per second. For each eligible household, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, put presents under the tree, eat any snacks, kiss mommy when available, get back up the chimney, hop in the sleigh and move on.
Assuming each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth, we're now talking about 0.78 miles per household - a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting stops to let Santa and the reindeer do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours.
This means Santa's sleigh moves at 650 miles per second, or 3,000 times the speed of sound. The fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles a second (a conventional reindeer, by the way, can run 15 miles per hour, tops).
Assuming each child gets nothing more that a medium-sized Lego set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting overweight Santa . Conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting flying reindeer could pull 10 times the normal amount, Santa would need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload (not counting the sleigh) to 353,430 tons, or four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth II.
353,000 tons travelling at 650 miles a second creates enormous air resistance, which would heat the reindeer to incandescence in the same fashion as spacecraft or meteors 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 creating deafening sonic booms. The entire team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second.
Santa , meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces of 17,500.06 gravities. A 250-pound Santa (a wee bit of an underestimate) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.
If Santa ever did deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's dead now.
i pulled this off someones journal entry at deviantart, im not sure where they got it though :P
have a merry christmas everyone!!!!
12:04 pm, Tuesday, December 24, 2002 (6 years ago)
what time does he stop it? midnight? and if he stops time... then doesn't that mean that nobody sees him? and that nobody has EVER seen him? then how do we know what he looks like?
well is was the guy at coca-cola that came up with the fat/jollie/happy design, before that santa was serious/skinny/and meant to scare children into being good... On happier note... Santa probably just plays some hoops from his sleigh while travels at the speed of light +
.compo.::: :: : the dayy i leearnn to spel is the dayy jennifffer lopez cann act
Heh heh, I've heard that before but I like the addition of them being vapourized, that just adds to the pessimism!
Not Santa-related but here's something I was thinking about today:
Someone famous (can't remember who) said that in the future everyone would get their 15 mins of fame. This struck me as pretty damn difficult seeing as there's about 6,000,000,000 people in the world, so I thought I'd do some maths.
It would take 171,233 years for everyone to have their moment of fame if they took it in turns, one at a time, obviously by which time most people would have died before their go. If you were to take a snapshot record of people alive now and an average lifespan of 75, even being totally optimistic only 0.000438% of the current population would make their 15 mins of fame before they died. You would have to simultaneously broadcast 228,311 streams of video/radio/etc (each stream reaching only 26,278 people if divided equally) for 75 years only to cover all of the people alive right now! You would also probably need around 10 people for each broadcast working in the background, making just the support team over 2 million people strong!
So I don't think everyone will get their 15 mins of fame, if you do then count yourself lucky!
- MooseSkin "You say potato, I say potato. You say tomato, I say tomato."
Well your 15 minutes of fame... could happen for many thousands of people all at the same time, you dont have to just get it on tv... it could just be in your own little village, or town, and your fame might only be with 40 people, doesnt have to be the whole world... see a whole crew of scientists could all get their fame at same time if they invented a cure for cancer or something... and if its a crew of 400 together...they all got their fame, most people wont have heard of them, but it is possible, you just thinking international fame, and technology, and their is other kinds of fame... not just over video/radio/ect... lol, everyone wants their 15 minutes :D hehe
Santa is real. I saw him when I was little. I was staying up real late one christmas eve looking at the wonderful tree and all the presents and in through the front door walked Santa. He stumbled past me and fell on the couch. When he saw me he called me over to sit on his lap. Then we played "ride the bucking bronco" and "find the tug boat". He never did say "ho, ho, ho" though....just a lot of "oh yah thats good".........
"Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us." -Calvin (calvin and hobbes)
