No known species of reindeer can
fly. However, about 300,000 species of living organisms
are yet to be classified, so flying reindeer may
exist.
There are about 2 billion children in the world.
Since Santa doesn't seem to visit Muslim, Hindi,
Jewish & Buddhist children, the number of children
to be visited drops to around 400 million. Also,
let's assume 100 million homes to be visited (not
all homes have the same number of children and not
all homes have good children!!).
Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with. This
is due to the different time zones and the rotation
of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which
seems logical).
This works out to almost 900 visits per second.
This is to say that for each household with good
children, Santa has 0.001 of a second to park, jump
down the chimney, fill the stockings, eat the cake,
drink the beer, get back into the sleigh and move
on to the next house.
With 100 million stops to make in 31 hours, Santa's
sleigh must be moving at 1,000 km/sec, 3,000 times
the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison,
interstellar space probes move at a slow 45 km/sec.
A conventional reindeer can run, tops, 25 km per
hour.
Now let's consider the payload on the sleigh. If
each child gets only a medium sized Lego set (1kg),
the sleigh is carrying over 400,000 tonnes, not
counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight.
On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more
than 150 kg. Even granting that "flying reindeer"
could pull 10 TIMES the normal amount, we cannot
do the job with 8, or even 9 reindeer. In fact,
we need 266,666.
The total weight - not counting the sleigh - is
now close to 450,000 tonnes. This is four times
the weight of a large ocean liner. 450,000 tonnes
traveling at 1,000 km/sec creates enormous air resistance.
This will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion
as a spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere.
The lead pair of reindeer will absorb such an enormous
amount of energy that they will burst into flame
instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them,
and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake.
The entire reindeer team will be vaporised within
5 thousandths of a second. Meanwhile, Santa will
be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,000 times
greater than gravity.
HO HO .........
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