Santa Claus: Face the Facts
Having just recently learned the story of Jolly old Saint Nicholas, Patty wanted answers. Immediately, she asked Maka, who (other than her brilliant older sister) was the smartest person Patty had to ask. the question was this: How in the heck does Santa do it? Maka, being the bookwormy smartypants (As Patty had her labeled) she was, answered Patty's question in the most logical way possible: he doesn't. Then, Patty had the nerve to ask why. And so ensued Maka's search, and after three days of careful calculations and brain-deadening research, Maka successfully answered that question as well. It went a little bit like this:
There are approximately 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, or Buddhist religions, the workload for Christmas is reduced to approximately 15% of the total, or 378 million. At an average rate of 3.5 children per household, which comes to 108 million homes, assuming 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 her travels east to west, which seems logical). That means 967.7 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with a good child, Santa has about 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney (Which can't be easy for a fat guy such as himself), fill the stockings, distribute the remaining under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney (even more difficult than the down trip), jump onto the sleigh and get on to the next house.
Now, assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the Earth (which, of course, is false, but accepted for the purposes of the calculations) there is 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, or 3,000 times the speed of sound. In comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle- the Ulysses space probe- moves at a measly 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles per hour.
The payload of the sleigh adds another element. Assuming that each child gets no more than a medium Lego ste (which weighs about two pounds), the sleigh is carrying over 5,000 tons, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that the "Magical Flying" reindeer could pull 10 times the normal amount, the job cannot be done by nine of them (that would be counting Rudolph)- Santa would need 360,000 of them- which 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 traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance, which would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering Earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each, and therefore burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team (that would be the one with 360,000 of them, by the way) would be vaporized 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 miles per second in .001 seconds, would be subjected to centrifugal forces of 17,500 g's. A 250 pound Santa (which seems ridiculously 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.
To say the least, if Santa did exist, he is dead now. Good thing he's magic!
In case it wasn't obvious, Patty did not like that answer one bit. Merry Christmas!
~Fish