Body & Soul6 mins ago
How fast can reindeer really fly??
There are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified,
with most of them being insects and germs. There are no known species of flying Reindeer, except of course those owned by Santa Claus.
There are 2 billion children in the world (persons under 18 years of age), but since Santa appears not to visit Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces his workload to 15% of the total, ie about 378 million according to recent population surveys.
At an average rate of 2.5 children per household, that makes 91.8 million homes.
Santa has 31 hours of Christmas in which to work, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming that he travels East to West. This works out to 822.6 visits per second. That is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, jump out and down the chimney, fill the stockings and pillow cases, distribute the remaining parcels under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney and onto 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 they are not), we are talking about 0.78 miles per household. A total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us need to do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and watering the Reindeers.
This means that Santa's sleigh must travel at least 650 miles per second, 3000 times the speed of sound. For the purposes of comparison, the fastest human made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a porky 27.4 miles per second.
A conventional reindeer can run at, tops, 15 miles per hour.
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In conclusion - if Santa ever did deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's dead now.
Foundations. This enquiry is based on the premise that there is only one Santa Claus. The calculations work out more realistically if we assume some form of 'parallel processing'. A thousand Santa's (1 kilosanta) or a million (1 megasanta) or more, working in parallel, could perform the same number of visits in the same allotted time with less advanced technology
and fewer vaporised reindeers.
One other point : Who does the Air Traffic Control for a megasanta?A million sleighs and 12 million reindeer occupy a significant amount of airspace. If we assume that each reindeer team, including sleigh and Santa needs no more than 5 feet of vertical airspace, which leaves very little room for error as we know that the average reindeer with antlers is 5 feet tall, then a megasanta requires almost 947 miles of vertical space.
This also disregards the fact that each Santa must make frequent landings. The airspace at chimney height will therefore be in great demand and will be disproportionately crowded particularly as Christmas-celebrating households tend to be densely clustered in the same geographic area. It seems likely that a megasanta, while perhaps avoiding vaporised reindeer, would suffer huge casualties from mid air sleigh collisions.
cont..........
In conclusion - if Santa ever did deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's dead now.
Foundations. This enquiry is based on the premise that there is only one Santa Claus. The calculations work out more realistically if we assume some form of 'parallel processing'. A thousand Santa's (1 kilosanta) or a million (1 megasanta) or more, working in parallel, could perform the same number of visits in the same allotted time with less advanced technology
and fewer vaporised reindeers.
One other point : Who does the Air Traffic Control for a megasanta?A million sleighs and 12 million reindeer occupy a significant amount of airspace. If we assume that each reindeer team, including sleigh and Santa needs no more than 5 feet of vertical airspace, which leaves very little room for error as we know that the average reindeer with antlers is 5 feet tall, then a megasanta requires almost 947 miles of vertical space.
This also disregards the fact that each Santa must make frequent landings. The airspace at chimney height will therefore be in great demand and will be disproportionately crowded particularly as Christmas-celebrating households tend to be densely clustered in the same geographic area. It seems likely that a megasanta, while perhaps avoiding vaporised reindeer, would suffer huge casualties from mid air sleigh collisions.
cont..........
The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than one medium sized present (somehopes) weighing about 2 pounds, the sleigh must be carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa who is generally described as a bit porky. On land a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds! Even allowing that a 'flying reindeer' could pull ten times the normal amount, we could not do the job with eight or even ten. We would need 214,200 reindeer.
This then increases the payload, not even counting the weight of the sleigh, to 353,432 tons. Again for comparison, this is four times the weight of the QE2.353,432 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance which will heat up the reindeer in the same way as a spacecraft entering the earth's atmosphere. The leading pair of reindeer will absorb
14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second. Each. In short, they will spontaneously combust, exposing the pair behind them to the same fate and create deafening sonic booms in their wake.
The entire reindeer team will be vaporised within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500 times greater than gravity. A 250 pound Santa (now who's being generous) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.
cont....
This then increases the payload, not even counting the weight of the sleigh, to 353,432 tons. Again for comparison, this is four times the weight of the QE2.353,432 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance which will heat up the reindeer in the same way as a spacecraft entering the earth's atmosphere. The leading pair of reindeer will absorb
14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second. Each. In short, they will spontaneously combust, exposing the pair behind them to the same fate and create deafening sonic booms in their wake.
The entire reindeer team will be vaporised within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500 times greater than gravity. A 250 pound Santa (now who's being generous) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.
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