Post
by Coolant » Sun Apr 18, 2004 4:12 am
For all the logical people:
But but but...no Santa? Sniff.
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 Father Christmas has ever seen.
2) There are 2 billion children (persons under 18 ) in the world. BUT
since Father Christmas 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) Father Christmas 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, Father Christmas 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 etc.
This means that Father Christmas'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 Father Christmas,
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 amount, 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 (the ship, not the actual Queen). Think of
the weight on your roof!
5) 353,000 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air
resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as a
spacecraft 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 flames 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.
Father Christmas, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces
17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250-pound Father Christmas (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.
In conclusion - If Father Christmas ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's dead now.
[A friend sent this to me... quite funny]
Wayne
Coolant "The Cold"