Scooter,
Thats a good question. We all better ask the same question as i have just come to the stark realization that we will not be recieving one from Sanata for christmas. He doesn't exist!!!! if he does I cant make the numbers addd up......look.
There are approximately two billion children in the world (under 18). However since santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu Jewish or Buddist religions, this reduces the workload on Christmas night to 15% of the total, or 378 million. At an average global census rate of 3.5 children per household, that comes to 108 million homes.
Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the rotation of the earth and different time zones. Presuming that there is at least one good child in each home this works out at 967.7 visits per second. This is to say that for each household with a good child, Santa has around 1/1000th of a second to:- Park the sleigh
- Hop out
- Distribute presents
- Eat whatever snaks have been left for him
- Take the carrot left for Rudolf and his pals back up the chimney
- Jump back on the sleigh and get on to the next house
Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which of course it isn't but for the purposes of our calculations), we are talking about 0.78 miles per household; a total trip of some 75.5 million miles, not counting toilet stops or breaks. This means Santa is moving at 650 miles per second-3000 times the speed of sound. For the purpose of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulyesses space probe, moves at a pokey 27.4 miles per second, and the conventional Mk1 Reindeer can only run at best 15mph.
The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each good child gets at most a medium sized lego set of 2lbs, the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousand tons, not counting Santa himself - who is by all accounts a rather portly gent.
On land a Mk1 Reindeer can pull no more than 300lbs. Even granting that the 'flying reindeer' could pull ten times the normal amount, the job cannot be done with eight or nine or even ten of them - Santa would require 360,000 of them! this increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, by another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth 2 ( the ship, not the monarch).
Around 600,000 tonnes traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance - this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering 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 ear deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire Reindeer team would be vaporized in 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 0.001 second, would be subjected to centrifugal forces of 17,500g's. A 250lb Santa (which seem ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015lbs of force, instantaneously crushing bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo!!