I’m beginning to have doubts about the existence of Santa. Could it all be a massive scam? It would be terrible, but when you think about it, it doesn’t really seem to fit together. Here are a few things:
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No known species of reindeer can fly. There are still 300.000 living organisms that have yet to be classified, and although most of them are insects and bacterias, the existance of flying reindeers that only santa have seen can not be excluded totally, but it seems quite unlikely.
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There are 2 billion children (aged under 18 ) in the world, BUT because santa doesn’t seem to serve muslim, hindu, jewish or buddhist children, the work load is reduced to 15% of all children -378 million children. With an average of 3,5 childrens per household, it amounts to 91,8 million homes. It is estimated that there is at least one good kid in every home.
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Santa has 31 christmas hours to work on, thanks to the different time zones and earth’s rotation, if we assume that he’s travelling from east to west (which seems logical). This means 822,6 visits per second. Which in turn means that for every christian home with good children, santa has 1/1000 of a second to park his sled, jump out with the sack, get down that chimney, fill the socks with presents, leave the rest of the presents under the three, eat some of the snacks that have hopefully been left for him, get up trough the chimney, back up in the sled and get going again. We will now assume that all christian houses are evenly distanced from each other on the earth (which is of course not true, but for the sake of this calculation, we’ll have to accept it for now). This gives us 1,2 kilometres between each house. A trip of 120,8 million kilometres in total. This doesn’t include pit stops for what most of us would need to do at least once during the period of 31 hours, plus feeding of the animals etc. This means that santas sled is moving at a speed of Mach 3000, 1045 kilometres per second. Compair this with the fastest man made vehicle, Ulysses space shuttle, which is a snail at 43,8 kilometres per second. A normal reindeer has a topspeed of 24Km/h
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Another interesting thing is the weight of the sled. If we assume that every child doesn’t get anything more than a standard sized toy that weights 1,5kg, the sled should weight in at 321000 tons. That does not include santa who is usually described as over weight. Conventional reindeer can pull a load of 220kg max. Even if special flying reindeer can pull 10 times that weight, 8 reindeers won’t be enough. We would need 214200 reindeers. This increases sled weight to 353430 tons, four times the weight of atlantic cruiser Queen Elizabeth.
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353000 tons travelling at a speed of 1045Km/s creates a massive amount of drag. This will heat up the reindeers the same way a space ship returning to the earths atmosphere. The first couple of reindeers would absorb 143 quintrillion joules of pure energy per second each. They would incinerate almost instantly, which would set the couple behind on fire, and so on. They would also create a deafening bang in their wake. The whole group of reindeers would burn up after approximately 4,26 thousands of a second. Santa would during this time be exposed to centrifugal forces of about 17500 times gravity. A 182 kg santa would then be pushed to the back wall of the sled with a force of 3149961kg.
Sorry kids, but if santa ever delivered christmas gifts, he’d be dead by now.
Is “Henke” Swedish for “Scrooge?”
Is “Lampchop” English for “Eccles?”
If santa brings not the coal. Who then?