Allegedly this came from an engineer at Intel . . .
REINDEER FLYING
1) No known species of reindeer can fly. BUT there are 300,000 species o f living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are ins ects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.
NUMBER OF CHILDREN
2) There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world.
BUT since Santa doesn't (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhi
st children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total - 378 million
according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate
of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes.
One presumes
there's at least one good child in each.
TIME NEEDED
3) Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the differe
nt time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to
west (which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second.
This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Sa
nta has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down t
he chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under
the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, g
et back into the sleigh and move on to the next house.
Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (
which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calcul
ations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household
, a total trip of 75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what mo
st of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc.
This means that 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 on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 mile
s per second - a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour
WEIGHT OF SLEIGH
4) The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assum
ing that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized Lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons,not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight.
On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that "flying reindeer" (see point #1) could pull TEN TIMES the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight,or even nine.
We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload - not even counting the weight of the sleigh - to 353,430 tons. A
gain, for comparison, this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.
ENERGY PROBLEMS
5) 353,000 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates enormous
air resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as a
spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere.
The lead pair of reindee
r 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 create deafening sonic booms in their wake. Th
e entire reindeer team will be vaporised within 4.26 thousandths of a se
cond.
Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to acceleration forces 17,500
.06 times greater than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds
of force.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion - If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christ
mas Eve, he's dead now. (This is a theoretical model that obviously h
as not included factors such as elf-magic or enchanted reindeer.)
Write to Elizabeth Cleary
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