22 days to go

Ho ho ho Merry Christmas.

Are you all feeling suitably festive with all this snow around?

Hopefully you’ll all find todays Advent blog quite interesting; I’m going to try and answer the age old question of whether Santa exists or not using the awesome power of science….

So point number one about the validity of the Santa legend - No known species of reindeer can fly. BUT there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified by science, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out the idea of flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen, so we’ll call this one a possibility.


Point number two - There are 2 billion children in the world. But as Santa doesn't appear to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children that reduces his workload to about 15% of the total population - a mere 380 million children according to the Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes, presuming there’s at least one good child in each. That’s a lot of households, but given Santas supposedly magic powers and the above mentioned flying reindeer it’s still a possibility.

Point number three – Santa only has 31 hours of Christmas in which to deliver every single present, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he is travelling east to west (which seems logical).

Assuming point number two is correct, 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;
fill the stockings;
distribute the remaining presents under the tree;
eat whatever snacks have been left;
get back up the chimney;
get back into the sleigh;
and move on to the next house.
Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which they wont be), we are now talking about .78 miles between households, a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding the reindeers all the carrots left by children etc.
This means that Santa's sleigh has to be moving at 650 miles per second, that’s 3,000 times the speed of sound. For the purposes of comparison, a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour! Hmmmm, it’s not looking good for ol’ St. Nick.

Point number four - The payload of the sleigh is going to add another interesting element to the debate.
Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized Lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is almost always described as plump, portly, rotund or just plain fat.
On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting the "flying reindeer" hypothesis, (see point one), and assuming they could pull ten times the normal amount, they wouldn’t be able do the job with eight, or even nine. You’d need 214,200 reindeer. This then increases the payload even more - not even counting the weight of the sleigh - to 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison - this is nearly four times the weight of the ship The Queen Elizabeth!
It’s not looking good for ol’ Santa – unless he’s been giving his reindeer steroids that is.

Point number five - So now we get to it, 353,000 tons, travelling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance - this will heat the reindeer in much the same way as a spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 Quintillion joules of energy per second!
Each!
In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them to the same forces and creating a deafening sonic boom in their wake. The entire reindeer team would be vaporised within 4.26 thousandths of a second.
Santa, meanwhile, would be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500,061 times greater than earths 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, squashing him flat. This could only be prevented by some kind of ‘star trek’ force field, which has never been mentioned in any of the Christmas stories I was told as a child, Santa never uttered the line
“shields up Rudolph”
That being the case the only conclusion we can reach is either

a) If Santa was ever alive, with the increase in population, he’s dead now.
b) He’s stole some kind of force field from the Enterprise, or
c) He and his team of Reindeer are ‘magic’.

Merry Christmas everyone