Kev

This is so disturbing, I might have to stop believing................

There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the
world.

However, since Santa does not usually visit children of Muslim, Hindu,
Jewish or Buddhist religions, this reduces the workload for Christmas
night 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 comes to 108 million homes presuming there is at least
one good child in each.

Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the
different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming east to
west(which seems logical). This works out to 967.7 visits per second.
This is to say that for each Christian household with a good child, Santa has
around 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the
chimney, fill the stocking, distribute the remaining presents under the
tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the
chimney, jump into the sleigh and get onto the next house. Assuming that each of
these 108million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which, of
course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purposes of our
calculations), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household -a
total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stops or breaks.

This means 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, the Ulysses space probe, and moves at a poky 27.4 miles per
second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles per hour.


The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming
that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized LEGO set (two pounds),
the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousand tons, not counting Santa
himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even
granting that the "flying" reindeer can pull 10 times the normal amount,
the job can't be done with eight or even nine of them---Santa would need
360,000 of them. This increases the payload, not counting the weight of
the sleigh, another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of
the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch).

600,000 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air
resistance - this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a
spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer
would adsorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each. In
short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the
reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire
reindeer team would be vaporised within 4.26 thousandths of a second,
or right about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip.

Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating
from a dead stop to 650 m.p.s. in .001 seconds, would be subjected to
acceleration forces of 17,000 g. A 250 pound Santa (which seems
ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015
pounds of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing
him to a quivering blob of pink goo. Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's
dead now.

Merry Christmas!!

Richard Askew

oh my god!! u killed Santa.... u b4stard!!!

fast bloke

Ok Kev - you are a grown boy now, so we need to tell you the truth - Santa doesn't really use reindeer. He has a 5 door scoob, which copes with the acceleration and payload admirably

To be totally honest, I always wondered why he delivers stuff in Argos boxes. He must manufacture toys for Argos in his spare time

TonyG

Has anyone else noticed that 'Santa' is an anagram of 'Satan'?

fast bloke

And TonyG is an anagram of...... well nothing really except ontgy, which is a bit scary

Damaja

Or Gonty, which is just plain wierd

roadrunner

I thought Santa used some sort of advanced low-atmospheric scramjet with built-in flex-capacity drive on his sleigh. Or he could just be employing millions of parents every year to help out with the escalating demand driven from children who see the so called "This is a must have toy" adverts in between cartoons in the early hrs of the morning when parents are defenceless due to the night before

I'll go and get my coat

rr

AndiThompson

LOL!

First thing to make me laugh all day!

Well done mate!