There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the world.
However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist (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 (census) rate of 3.5children 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 108 million 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, 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 traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance - this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft reentering 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 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 mps in .001 seconds, would be subjected to acceleration forces of 17,000 g's. 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.
Quod erat demonstrandum if Santa did exist, he's dead now.
OMG, I'm shocked to see Wazzu wrote this, I thought for sure Wagga wrote it.
Wazzu, seriously, there is a Santa and he is not dead. An Engineering perspective can't come close to the wonders of the powers of Santa. He's got super special powers from living at the North Pole and from the special foods and candies Mrs. Claus prepares for him. I think Santa's secret to how he delivers all the presents in one night around the world to all the good boys and girls is in the food he eats....we are what we eat. Thanks to Mrs. Claus he has the energy every Christmas Eve to circle the globe and slither down chimneys. I bet Mrs. Claus makes a special reindeer food too which gives the reindeers lots of energy to fly at amazingy fast speeds. Keep an eye out on Christmas Eve and you might catch a glance of Jolly Old St. Nick streaming by in the skies of Orange County. I know I'll be watching for him.
Yeah, Wazzu has a good theory, but I like mine and Charles Curry's better and I bet all the girls and boys around the world would agree with Charles and me over Wazzu.
Hey Steve C., you must have been a good boy in 2011 in order to get six days off work over the holidays. Congratulations, now you can stay home and work on the WZ.
My work has taken me to using zip & postal codes for various countries. Canada uses 6 characters, alternating Alpha & Numeric - ie A0N 2G0 (Black Duck Siding,Newfoundland).
Why all this? The official North Pole postal code is H0H 0H0.
Verum audaces non gerunt indusia alba. - Ipsi dixit MCMLXXII
My work has taken me to using zip & postal codes for various countries. Canada uses 6 characters, alternating Alpha & Numeric - ie A0N 2G0 (Black Duck Siding,Newfoundland).
Why all this? The official North Pole postal code is H0H 0H0.
That has to be the world's greatest postal code.
But, from another thread -- does anyone know what happened near V0T 1W0 and 99923?
Ok I have got to go to work now dont have time to look up more on this but way did zip code 99923 have a population of 87 and now 0 I'll check back at 6pm tonight...
But Really....reindeer piss? Mushroom infused reindeer piss? If you weren't already flying before you drank it, you will be after drinking that stuff. Honestly,if I were a drinking man I would have to invent a cocktail called reindeer piss just because I listened to that presentation!
