“Santa Claus is anyone who loves another and seeks to make them happy.”
Our parents only told a little part of the story, but I am here to show you that the jolly old dude is way greater than we imagined as children.
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The job of Santa is epic. He is epic. It is all epic. However, your parents only told you a little bit of the story. You want to know the truth about the crazy, weird, wild, powerful, cool story… look no further than science. I have always loved Santa. I have always loved Stories. Stories, legends, tales, epics, sagas, and fables have been given to each new generation to pass on imagination, information, ideas, and feelings. We as a society are connected by tales being passed on from one person to the next. As it passes on it gets a little added personal flavor from one person to the next added to it. My flavor always comes in the form of science.
Good ol’ Santa Claus… The man, the myth, the legend. A jolly old man who delivers presents throughout the globe to all the children of the world. A world composed of 2 Billion children, however his work load gets cut down to 387 Million because sadly Santa only has to worry about 387 million Christian children if he sticks to the script. But I know for a fact that Santa is a bit of a maverick and will bring presents to anyone who loves life and happiness.
I have always loved Santa. I have always loved Stories. Stories, legends, tales, epics, sagas, and fables have been given to each new generation to pass on imagination, information, ideas, and feelings. We as a society are connected by tales being passed on from one person to the next. As it passes on it gets a little added personal flavor from one person to the next added to it. My flavor always comes in the form of science.
This is what Santa pulls off every Dec. 25th. Having done this thousands and thousands of times he has honed his skills for ages. Along with exponential growth of the human population with people having more and more children who live longer and longer Santa has to exponential step his game up.
Time and job:
-He has 31 hours to pull this off. 31 hours because of the time zones, rotation of the Earth and traveling East to West (assuming he travels in straight lines).
-2 Billion kids -387 Million Christians -Cenus data says there are 3.5 kids per house with 91.8 million homes and the assumption that there are at least one “good” kid per home.
Time: With only 31 hours, he has to make 822.6 visits/second - 1/1000th second at each home
Equal distribution would put each home .78 miles(even distribution)
Speed: 650 miles/second - 3000x the speed of sound
Payload:
If we assume that each kids only gets 2lbs of toys (average lego set)
-321,300 tons of toys let alone the weight of the sled and the jolly man himself
-The reindeer … assuming that each could pull 10x the weight of a normal reindeer there would need to be 214,200 reindeer.
I think this is where natural selection comes in… I’ll talk about Santa and his time properties in a minute, but I believe that Santa has breed reindeer for generation… each time selecting reindeer that were bigger faster stronger, giving them the must up to date nutritional food and supplement (maybe PED’s - for the children).
Also, turns out that Rudolph bioluminescence nose that emits red light is the best light for cutting through fog. Seems like a bonus, but again selective breeding or maybe a heighten reflective paint or nose prothesitic.
Now the sled is ready to go.
Science: 353,430 tons @650 miles/sec … Air Resistance and heating are the biggest hurdles the sleigh, deer, and Santa are faced with.
The Sleighs acceleration must be epic! F = ma with that amount of “m” and the “a” required to get going instantly from house to (.78 miles) to maximize the 1/1000th of second at each home .. The force required to move the sleigh is silly.
Once he accelerates instantly to this speed the air resistance would reach 14.3 quintillion joules of force. This is caused by the gas laws would cause the wonderful life sustaining atmosphere to compress rapidly and heat up… Normally this would vaporize the whole system (sled, deer, santa, presents) in a mere 4.26 thousands of the a sec.
Finally the force a 250 lbs Santa would experience centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity and be pushed back in his seat with 4,315,015 pounds of force.
Diet: Assuming a standard glass of milk is 8 fluid ounces, that means Santa drinks about 137 million gallons of milk over the night, or about 4 million gallons of milk every hour.
Assuming the good boys and girls in the U.K. stick to tradition and leave a glass of sherry, Santa would be able to skip 4.2 million glasses of milk. He would, however, be drinking 1.3 million bottles of Sherry wine in an hour.
Assuming each household in the whole world leaves out two chocolate chip cookies (we're using Pillsbury ready-bakes. Hey, it's the holidays), that means at every house he would stack up
170 calories, 14g of sugar, and 8g of fat.
In total, that'd be 374 billion calories, 33,000 tons of sugar, and 151,000 tons of fat.
Assuming Santa's running an 8-minute mile, he'd have to run for about 109 centuries (or 109,000 years in a row, without eating) to burn off those calories.
