Santa's statistical nightmare

1. No known species of reindeer can fly. BUT there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.

2. There are 2 billion children (persons under 18 ) in the world. BUT since Santa doesn't (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total - 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there's at least one good child in each.

3. Santa has 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 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at
least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc. This means that 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 on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second; a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.

4. The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that "flying reindeer" (see point #1) could pull TEN TIMES the normal anoint, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload - not even counting the weight of the sleigh - to 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison - this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.

5. 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecrafts re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per second. Each. In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.

In conclusion - If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's dead now. The above has not been verified so wait till the 26th to be sure!

:(
Santa is dead.
:(

haha .. ive seen stuff like this before.. i love reading this kind of facts ^_^

haha - let me explain how it's done:

First you should know that Santa read Heinlein when he was young. I'm refferring to "The number of the beast" for the scifi addicts in the house.

So what santa does is this:

According to the Eschatological Pantheistic Multiple Ego Solipsism theory - a universe is brought into existence by dreaming it. Any kind of universe. Some call those fictons (not fictions). So it's safe to assume that someone somewhere (perhaps even Santa) dreamed up a universe that includes flying raindeer. That's where he got those.

Good - that takes care of the flying raindeer.

Now - you all know that a time machine will go a long way to help you achieve the near impossible. So Santa actually takes it easy - delivers to a kid or two then has a few beers then jumps into his time machine, loops back on himself and delivers to the house next door...and so on and so on...It can take over 3-4 years to complete the delivery of goodies- and it's all made in the same objective day. Sure he ages a lot - but he's a member of the Lazarus Long family.... a Howard - he lives really really long.

That's the delivery issue.

The weight and mass:

Have you seen Hyercube? Well santa's bag is actually an inner space generator. The stuff inside never leaves the warehouse at the North Pole. It's just a vertex he's taking along. When he puts his hand inside the bad he reaches all the way to the north pole on a table there....where little walodes (or elves for the uninnitated) provide toys according to the lists.

The air friction thing falls for obvious reasons..

Santa's financing:

Come on - "time machine" as in "who's gonna win the Cup next year?"... a few carefully placed bets back in the 20's...and I know he bought Microsoft stock options before they became incorporated...owns half of Apple via third parties...

haha - SciFi rules

The #3 part ... that's a transcript from an old World News Tonight special where they featured my principal, Stanley Teitel, who actually worked everything out for clueless citizens of the east coast.

That is very cool, I love it when people post cool facts like these.

haha I read that before but its still good.

Santa didn't DIE! He is flying over Mineapolous (sp) right now! *looks in the air for the burning reindeer*

ROFL mihai ... thats an awesome reply ^_^