There are approximately two billion children (persons under
1
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 1/1000 th 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.
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 pokey 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
thousands 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 that
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 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) 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.
Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's in pretty bad shape now.
