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Got this in an e-mail, made me laugh abit
I thought this was so good I should share it with you all...
Dear Children,
There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Jehovah's Witness, or Buddhist religions, this reduces the workload for Christmas night to 15% of the total, or 378 million.
At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming that there is a 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. (That' s really why, it’s pointless to stay up and watch for him...)
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 calculation), we are now talking about 1.25km per household; a total trip of 121.5 million kms, not counting bathroom stops or breaks. This means Santa's sleigh is moving at 1050kms per second - 3,000 times the speed of sound.
For the purposes of comparison the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at at porky 44kms per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 24kms per hour. The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child has nothing more than a medium sized Lego set (1kg), the Sleigh is carrying over 500 thousand tonnes, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 136kg (about right for Santa on his own - even more if he eats all the snacks). 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, by another 54,000 tonnes, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch).
Furthermore, 600,000 tonnes travelling at 1050kms 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 vapourised within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip. Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 1050kms per second in .001 seconds, would be subjected to centrifugal forces of 17,500 G's. A 115kgs Santa (which seems ludicrously slim it must be said) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 1957258kgs 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 dead now.
Merry Christmas
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Originally Posted by Knoxville
- I did say only non-santa believers in the title 