I was a beliver until now....

[West Karma]

nm

[CaptainCrunch]

Pfft, wrong science. Santa has a flux capacitor in his sled. He hits a house, slides down the chimmney, drops off the gifts, drinks some milk and cookies. Creeps upstairs and diddles the wife after me in my cap had just settled down for a long roofied nap. Then he has a smoke and takes a nap, then slams back up the chimney into his sled. Dials the flux capacitor back 5 hours and speeds off to the next house and repeats the same thing while stopping at multiple 7-11's to drink gatorade and take vitamin B supplements.

So his trip takes 0 time due to the reseting of time.

By the way, the sled can travel at 5800 miles per hour due to the installation of a nitrous booster and steroid injected reindeer.

[arsenal]

Another report circulating on the Internet suggested however that Santa's sleigh, weighed down with presents and travelling at supersonic speed, would encounter such massive air resistance that the entire contraption would burst into flames and be vaporised within 4.26 thousandths of a second.

Just picturing santa going through this, makes me laugh for some reason.

[Ford Prefect]

Pffft ... consultants. What do they know. It's clearly a flawed study. First of all, it said the consultants who did it assumed that kids from all religions receive gifts for Christmas. They don't. Secondly, they overlooked the fact that Santa brings presents to only the good boys and girls. That brings his delivery list down to a more manageable two dozen or so kids worldwide. As the parents of the billions of other kids in the world know, we're the ones who have to fill in for Santa with our own less than angelic progeny.

What's more, all these brats keep the world's retailers in business. Without them, and their parents having to shell out greenbacks to play surrogate Santa, the world economy would crash. So go ahead Johnny ... throw that ice ball at sister Susie. World peace and harmony depends on it.

[Burninator]

The Science Behind Santa
Around the globe, today, live approximately two billion children (persons under 18). Santa doesn't visit all of them, of course. Subtracting the number of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, or Buddhist children reduces Santa's Christmas Eve workload to 15 percent of the total, or 378 million children (according to the Population Reference Bureau). At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, and presuming that there is at least one good child in each home, Santa must visit about 108 million homes.

Santa has about 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 967.7 visits per second. That means that at each 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, and get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh, and get on to the next house.

For the purposes of our calculations, we will assume that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false). We're talking about a trip of 0.78 miles per household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stops or breaks. To cover that ground in 31 hours, Santa's sleigh moves at 650 miles per second--3,000 times the speed of sound. By 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 must carry over 500 thousand tons, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. In air, even granting that the "flying" reindeer could pull 10 times the normal amount, the job can't be done with a mere eight or 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).

Six hundred thousand tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance--this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft reentering 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 reached the fifth house on his trip.

Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650 miles per second 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.

[Sainters7]

Originally Posted by arsenal

Just picturing santa going through this, makes me laugh for some reason.

Haha just cut and was about to paste that exact same thing to say exactly what you said. That's just a hilarious mental image. Something about Santa bursting into flames and being vapourized is just pure comicedic gold

[Thunderball]

Originally Posted by arsenal

Just picturing santa going through this, makes me laugh for some reason.

Glad to see I'm not the only one with a horrible sense of humor. I laughed out loud when I read that.

[llama64]

Santa's Sleigh is powered by the Infinite Improbability Drive. Duh.

[Ford Prefect]

Originally Posted by llama64

Santa's Sleigh is powered by the Infinite Improbability Drive. Duh.

Of course ... I should have known that. Doh.

[Resolute 14]

A rebuttal to the engineering analysis: http://www.inflection-point.com/jokes/122.htm

[Teh_Bandwagoner]

Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch

Pfft, wrong science. Santa has a flux capacitor in his sled. He hits a house, slides down the chimmney, drops off the gifts, drinks some milk and cookies. Creeps upstairs and diddles the wife after me in my cap had just settled down for a long roofied nap. Then he has a smoke and takes a nap, then slams back up the chimney into his sled. Dials the flux capacitor back 5 hours and speeds off to the next house and repeats the same thing while stopping at multiple 7-11's to drink gatorade and take vitamin B supplements.

So his trip takes 0 time due to the reseting of time.

By the way, the sled can travel at 5800 miles per hour due to the installation of a nitrous booster and steroid injected reindeer.

You win at this thread.

[PYroMaNiaC]

I'm suprised that this engineer hasn't taken into account that Santa was way ahead of us on the technology scale even in the beginning. I mean, Santa has been around for a little longer than 300 years. In the early years, he only needed one flying white horse. He then upgraded to the team of flying reindeer when the population soared. In the technology age of today, who knows what kind of amazing and wonderous things he's implemented in order to get the team to all the houses that require him.

I'm with Captain. He's probably got a flux capacitor.

[CrusaderPi]

Originally Posted by llama64

Santa's Sleigh is powered by the Infinite Improbability Drive. Duh.

I'm on board with this one.

[Iowa_Flames_Fan]

Well, they can knock off the list Christian countries that don't believe in Santa Claus.... so that would be Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and I'm sure there are others. That probably cuts his trip down a little, allowing him to spend more like 50 microseconds in each house.

Besides, they're missing the real point here--which is that Santa is magic. That means he can do whatever the hell he wants and Science can take its calculations, go back to MySpace and try to find a girlfriend.

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by Iowa_Flames_Fan

Besides, they're missing the real point here--which is that Santa is magic. That means he can do whatever the hell he wants and Science can take its calculations, go back to MySpace and try to find a girlfriend.

I'll believe in Santa when he delivers me a girlfriend for Christmas.

[CrusaderPi]

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

I'll believe in Santa when he delivers me a girlfriend for Christmas.

Even Santa's magic can only do so much.