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 3.5 children 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 or 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 (non-turbo) 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 II. A mass of nearly 600,000 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance - this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering 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 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 m.p.s. in .001 seconds, would be
subjected to acceleration forces of 17,000 g's. A 250 pound Santa (which
seems ludicrously slim considering all the effect of the high calorie
snacks) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by
4,315,015 pounds of force, instantly crushing him. Therefore, if Santa did
exist, he's dead now.
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