POOR SANTA
And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness. (2 Thessalonians 2:11&12)
POOR SANTA, WE’VE KILLED HIM!
(Don’t tell the kids!)
AN ENGINEER
There are approximately two billion children in the world (persona under eighteen). However, since Santa Claus does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist religions (except maybe in Japan), this reduces the workload for ‘christmas’ night to 15% of the total, or 378 million (according to the Population Reference Bureau). At an average (census) rate of3.5 children per household, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming there is at least one good child in each (Santa has stated he only visits good children!).
Santa has about 31 hours 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 at 976.7 visits per second. In other words, for each Christian household with a good child, Santa has around 1/l00th of a second to park his 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. Whew!
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 of75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stops or breaks. This means Santa’s sleigh is travelling at 650 miles per second – 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 fat 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! This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, another 5,400 tons or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth – the ship, that is, not the monarch!
600,000 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance, and 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 each absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second. 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.
Not that it matters, however, since Santa as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650mps 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.
If Santa Claus ever existed, he’s dead now.
(Taken From The 1521 Paper)