Now, I don’t want to risk the amount of presents I get annually, but I do note that the Santa as we know him cannot exist. His current operation is fraud with too many problems, largely based in Physics himself. For Santa to exist, he’d have to have an entirely different operation than we’d expect, which I will document in the next post.
For now, it is definitely proven that Santa has a lot of work before himself if he wants to deliver presents to everyone. Here are the physics based problems, and some small-term shortcuts:
“Santa Physics” Table of Contents
Part I: General Physics
Part II: Future Tech
Part III: An Alternative Method
Santa’s Customer Load
He’s not delivering to the entire world population of 6.69 billion people. He only delivers to children, of which there are about 2.2 billion. Of those children, he does not deliver to Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children — he’s got some sort of corporate deal with other present-delivering forces. This leaves a population of approximately 378 million according to the Population Reference Bureau.
Wikipedia reports 2.6 children per household, giving Santa an initial delivery load of 145.3 million homes. Nearly every kid gets presents nowadays, so we won’t factor in the naughty/nice for our calculations.
Santa’s Operational Time
Even without adding any time travel to the mix, Santa has more than 24 hours to work with. Santa can use time-zones to his advantage. By flying westward he can have an operational period of 31 hours. This means he has to deliver to 145.3 million homes in 31 hours — or 1302 houses a second.
That’s very little time. Even if Santa worked 24 hours, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, all year-round, he would still have to travel to, unload, and deliver to five houses every second.
Santa’s Payload
Assuming that Santa is carrying a single, average lego set for each child — that’s roughly 1kg of presents per child. With 2.6 children per house and 145.3 million houses, that’s a payload of 377,780 metric tons.
The known reindeer can pull about 136kg. A noted drawback is that Santa would need 4 million reindeer to pull his payload. However, this comment is kind of stupid as the known reindeer also doesn’t fly and physics are certainly different in the air than in the ground.
Air Resistance
Yes. Physics are different in the air than on ground. It’s actually harder to pull things through the air. The air resistance involved in pulling hundreds of thousands of metric tons the speed needed to travel between houses hundreds of times per second.
Assuming Santa did visit 1302 houses a second to drop off 377,780 metric tons of presents, he would definitely burn up in the atmosphere.
The Reindeer Problem
Of course, the other problem is that Santa has flying reindeer. No documented specie of reindeer is known to be capable of flight, and no visible biological mechanism in Santa’s reindeer (such as wings) seems to support flight.
Solutions
Well, I can’t give you everything in one installment, can I?
Rest assured that I’m not being pessimistic, and proposed solutions using future tech are in Part II.
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