For the Believers

Santa Facts

No known species of reindeer can fly. BUT there are 300,000 species
of living organism yet to be classified, and while most of these are
insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule our flying reindeer,
which only Santa has ever seen.

There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. But since
Santa doesn't (appear to) handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist
children, that reduces the workload 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 is 91.8 millions homes. One
presumes there's at least one "good" child in each.

Santa 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,
Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump
down the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house.
Assuming that each one of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed
around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but for the
purpose of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78
miles per household, a total trip of 75 and a half million miles, NOT
counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours,
plus feeding etc. This means Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per
second, 3000 times the speed of sound. For purpose 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.

The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each
child gets nothing more than a medium sized Lego Set (2 lbs), the sleigh is
carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight.
On landing, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 330 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 reindeer. 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!

353,430 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance. This
will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as space craft re-entering the earths
atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy ...
per second ... EACH! In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously,
exposing the reindeer behind them, and creating deafening Sonic Booms in their wake.
The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa,
meanwhile, will be subject to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity.
A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his
sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.

So how does Santa do it? How does Santa complete the trip year after year? Is there
something else that we don't know?

Of course silly... Santa is a magical, Mystical Elf... you just have to believe in
him and his Incredible,Magical, Mystical Extraordinary powers!

Everyone knows that when he touches his nose Magic Happens!

If you don't, you'll be put on his naughty List

This is brought to you by the Marble Sail in a temporary alliance with Marisa Bell. Soon, Marisa shall be executed so she wishes to give you all a Chirstmas gift. Please contact her as soon as you can as this blog is insecure. The contact information is as follows: Email: Contact Jasmine if you don't have it already, Phone #: Contact Jasmine, or Any other means of communication: Contact Jasmine.
-the Marble Sail