How Hard Does Santa Work? Several years ago a group of accountants subjected Santa Clause to a bit of scrutiny to figure out just how hard he has to work to make Christmas happen. The analysis calculated that there were around 378 million children in the Christian world (at that time); and at just over 4.1 children per household, thats about 98.1 million homes. Right or wrong, they also assumed at least one good child per home. Time zone variances give Santa 31 hours to work with, which means he must visit 822.6 homes per second. That is to say that for every Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to land. hop out of his sleigh, fill the stockings, place presents under the tree, eat the cookies, drink the milk, get back in the sleigh and take off. In order to do his job within the 31 hour time frame his sleigh would have to travel at 3,000 times the speed of sound, which is 650 miles per second. The fastest man-made vehicle (at the time) the Ulysses space probe, moves at a pokey 27.4 miles per second. The sleighs payload- assuming nothing larger than a medium sized Lego set weighing 2lbs, is 321,300 tons, and even if flying Reindeer have 10 times the pulling power of ordinary reindeer, he would need 214,000 of them. Finally, 353,000 tons (sleigh and reindeer combined), travelling at 650 miles per second, creates ENORMOUS air resistance. The lead pair of reindeer (Rudolph and his pals) would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy. Per second. EACH! In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously. Santas whole flying circus would, according to the analysis, burn up like a spacecraft re-entering the atmosphere. So not only is Santa a busy, hard working fellow, hes nothing short of a miracle!
Posted on: Tue, 02 Dec 2014 22:55:27 +0000
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