There are approximately two billion children (persons under 12) 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 world population, 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 that 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 he travels 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 stockings, 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 on to 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 I will accept this 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, 2,340,000 miles per hour, or if you have a fetish for Mach speed (our Air Force friends love this one) - Mach
3,120. 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 reindeer can run (at best) 17 miles per hour if being pursued by a pack of hungry wolves.
The payload of the sleigh adds another fascinating 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 a “flying” reindeer could pull ten 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 Queen Elizabeth II (the ship, not the monarch).
600,000 tons of Christmas cheer traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance–this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as the Space Shuttle re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. The lead reindeer, Rudolf, would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second per second. In short, he would burst into flames
faster than a 4th of July barbecue, exposing the eight remaining, terrified reindeer to a deafening sonic boom followed nanoseconds
later by a fiery Armageddon. The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa reached for the emergency bottle of Heinz hickory-flavored barbecue sauce in the cockpit of the sleigh.
Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650 mps in .0001 seconds, would be subjected to acceleration forces of 17,500 g’s. Remember, a good Air Force plane driver, if such a thing exists, can withstand about 9-11g’s before blacking out. A 250-pound Santa (which seems slim even by Richard Simmons’ standards) would be rocketed to the back of the sleigh by
4,315,015 pounds of force, instantly crushing his bones and turning his internal organs into a troubling pate.
In short, Santa’s journey upon a midnight clear would reduce him and the barbecued reindeer team to a quivering blob of char-blackened goo.
Therefore, if Santa did exist, he’s dead now. Get over it. Deal with
it. Merry Freakin’ Christmas.
