Growing up as a child I always had my doubts about Santa but never really bothered to sit down and think about it all logically. But recently - when I was a bit bored - I started thinking about the practical implications of Santa’s Christmas Eve task and came up with several SEVERELY crippling problems to this clearly non existant character.
Problem 1: Flying Reindeer
No known species of reindeer are known to fly. Even though there are an estimated 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, (mostly insects and germs) it is unlikely that one of them will be a breed of flying reindeer that only Santa has ever seen.
Problem 2: Children
There are just over 2 billion children in the world today. But as Santa is traditionally a ‘western’ festive character and doesn’t seem to be a feature in a lot of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist communities etc, we can assume that the workload is reduced to about 15% of that number which is about 378 million. The average household is said to have around 3.5 children, at least one of which - I would like to assume - SHOULD have been good enough throughout the year to warrant a visit from Santa. If this IS the case, then Santa is left with 91.8 million homes to visit during the course of his overnight journey.
Provlem 3: Time
Assuming that he travels east to west, Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with due to the various time zones etc. At 91.8 million homes spread over 31 hours, this works out to a rather swift average of just under 823 visits per second! Therefore, for each house Santa visits, he has roughly 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, climb back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house.
And this does not cater for any stops to do what most of us need to do at least 1 time every 31 hours and once your over 40 about every hour !!
Problem 4: Speed
We know they’re not, but assuming each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth; it works out to an average of 0.78 miles between each household. This means that Santa’s entire delivery-route is around 75.5 million miles long. In order to make this in time, Santa’s sleigh would have to move at approximately 650 miles per second. (Roughly 3,000 times the speed of sound). The fastest man-made vehicle on earth (the Ulysses space probe) moves at just 27.4 miles per second. And Santa has just reindeer which can only do about 15mph on a good day.
Problem 5: Weight
The weight-payload on Santa’s sleigh adds another element to the equation. Assuming that each child gets no more than a medium-sized Lego set weighing 2lbs; the sleigh will be carrying 321,300 tons. This is without the added weight of Santa, who is generally described by all as being …lets say ‘overweight’.
On land, conventional reindeer can pull - at best - 300 pounds. And even assuming that these flying, super-reindeer may be able to pull say 10 times that amount, we still cannot do the job with the assumed 8 or 9 reindeer.
In order to be able to pull this 321,300 ton sleigh, Santa is gonna need 214,200 reindeer. The extra reindeer however, will now increases the overall payload to 353,430 tons (plus Santa) which is roughly four times the weight of the QE2 luxury cruise ship.
Problem 6: Force
353,430 tons, traveling at 650 miles per second will create massive air resistance. This would heat the reindeer up like a space-shuttle re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. This fatal problem means that the lead pair of reindeer will each absorb around 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second, causing them to near-instantly burst into flame exposing the reindeer behind them and so on, causing deafening sonic booms in their wake.
The entire fleet of 214,200 reindeer would be burned and vaporized within 5/1000ths of a second, after which, Santa will be subjected to centrifugal forces around 17,500 times greater than gravity.
An 18 stone Santa would be pinned like a leaf to the back of his now-burning sleigh by 4,315,000 lbs of force.
In conclusion, if Santa did ever deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he’s dead now!
oh and a merry fugging christmas too you all !!!