If Santa did exist (in theory)

[Aviehenda]

This is something to think about when u expect a visit from Santa this xmas [img]graemlins/blueblink.gif[/img]

If Santa did exist:

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 religions, this reduces the workload for Christmas night to 15%

of the total, or 378 million. At an average rate of 3.5 children per house hold, 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 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, which is 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 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 500,000 tons, not counting Santa himself.

On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that the "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 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 re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 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.

However, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650 miles per second in .001 seconds, would be subjected to centrifugal forces of 17,500 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 sure dead by then.

[ 10-15-2002, 04:05 PM: Message edited by: Aviehenda ]

[Grojlach]

Ah yes, I recall this one... Good for a chuckle.

[Morgeruat]

seen it before, but it doesn't take into account his numerous bag's of holding (which would significantly reduce the amount of weight he carries, and brings the # of reigndeer he needs down significanly) also it seems likely that the elves working for santa would be able to create some sort of wand to slow time (ala time-stop although with a greater duration) lol, yes in my PnP games I use Santa, all elf character get to spend their non-killing time in the game making toys for Santa, the toys also cannot have a military use (which frustrates the daylights out of my players)

[DJG]

LOL, yeah!

[SecretMaster]

Hey, thats pretty clever. Now i can finally prove it to my parents.

[Thoran]

Hogwash! We were just talking about time compression at relativistic speeds... well I propose that Santa uses a little known property of anti-matter combined with sugar cookies to create Time Expansion at relativistic speeds, that combined with souped up Reindeer with proper ceramic heat shielding allow him to take care of business without breaking a sweat. [img]smile.gif[/img]

[Sir Goulum]

Originally posted by Aviehenda: not counting bathroom stops or breaks.

Hey! Am I the only one that knows Santa wears diapers?

[The Trickster]

This is blasphemy! Everybody knows that there are several thousand Santa Clauses. Personally, I have seen 100's at different shopping malls and functions, not to mention all the Santa's that I've seen in movies.

Of course one couldn't complete all the work in one night!!! They're a tight-knit team!

don't forget Santa isn't allowed to fly near airports anymore [img]tongue.gif[/img]

[Calaethis Dragonsbane]

Originally posted by The Trickster: This is blasphemy! Everybody knows that there are several thousand Santa Clauses. Personally, I have seen 100's at different shopping malls and functions, not to mention all the Santa's that I've seen in movies. Of course one couldn't complete all the work in one night!!! They're a tight-knit team!

Ben... are you ok? Blasphemy is speaking out against God right? LOL [img]tongue.gif[/img] hehe, erm you dont REALLY beleive in Santa do you? [img]tongue.gif[/img] awww, I feel for ya man... *snigger*