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Join Date: Sep 2003
Location: PSB Cafe
Posts: 2,332
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There is no Santa!!
There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddist (except maybe in Japan) 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 rate of 3.5 children per house hold, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming that there is at least one good child in each. Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas t work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming that he travels 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 stockings, distribute the remanning presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh and get on to the next house.
Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course we know to be false, but will accept for the purpose of our calculations), we are now walking about 0.78 miles (1.25 km) per household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles (121.5 million km), not counting bathroom stops or breaks. This means that Santa’s sleigh is moving at 650miles (1046km) per second --- 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 (44km) per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles (24km) 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, or 900g) the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousand tons, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds (136kg). Even granting that flying reindeer could pull ten times the normal amount, the job cannot be done with eight or nine of them --- Santa would need 360, 000 of them. This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, another 54,00 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship not the monarch). 600, 000 tons travelling at 650 miles (1046km) per second creates enormous air resistance --- this would heat up the reindeer in the fashion as a space craft re-entering the earths atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 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 miles (1046km) per second in 0.001 seconds, would be subjected to acceleration forces of 17,500 g’s. A 250 pound (113kg) Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds (1,957,257kg) 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.
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