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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 (except maybe in Japan) religions, 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 of 3.5 children per household, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming 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 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 onto 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 not 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 - 3,000 times the speed of sound.

For purposes of comparison, the fastest man made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a pokey 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 thousand tons, not counting Santa himself.

On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that flying reindeer can pull 10 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).

A mass of nearly 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 reaches the fifth house on his trip.

Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650 m.p.s. in .001 seconds, would be subjected to acceleration forces of 17,000 g's.

A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim considering all the high calorie snacks he must have consumed over the years) 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 dead now.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

Santa & his reindeer are magic, therefore all your theories are blown to............
well.......... they don't matter anymore.

Interesting, except whoever wrote that piece obviously doesn't know a thing about Reindeer. This species has been clocked running at up to 50 miles per hour, and they can most certainly pull more than three hundred pounds.

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I'm not your neighbor, you Bakersfield trash.

Of course, it is possible that Santa is using a warp drive. Something akin to the Alcubierre Metric. As in this nice little mathematical curiosity discovered in 1994. Which allows for the existence of a warp bubble in the space time continuum that could carry Santa and the Reindeer at speeds in excess of that of light, while at the same time allowing Santa and the Reindeer to be at rest with respect to the internal space of the warp bubble and thus not subject to inertial forces. In case you think this is completely off the wall, not only has the mathematics been studied intensively around the world by various experts (indeed Scientific American ran a piece on this back in January 2000) but the warp bubble construction is consistent with general relativity and the metric defining the warp bubble is in conformity with the Einstein equations coupling the space-time stress tensor to gravity.

So perhaps Santa has beaten Captain Kirk to the warp drive. Now there's a thought for you to ponder.


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002

That prose is what happens when statisticians try and analyse fesivals observed by the humans.

*shakes head sadly*

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~~~ My fish blow kisses at me all day long ~~~

existed or not, its just something to help keep up the childrens spirits to believe in something pure and the main purpose of santa in adults, is to remind of us of a better time, for most of us our child hoods. and of course help out those less fortunate, even tho most do everyday.

so Merry christmas

Fish tanks are an expensive addiction

well he may warp time so he can deliver all those presents....and believing santa also keeps children in line so its all good. Maby some of Santa's reindeer arent matured yet so they can't run that fast....

ahhhh you beat me to the warp