Direct continuation of: A Solution to the Physics of Santa, Part I

In the previous part, we determined that, assuming a single Santa were to operate in the bounds of normal, expected physics, Santa is using flying reindeer to transport 377,780 metric tons of presents to 1302 houses per second for the entire period of Christmas Eve.

Yet Santa manages to do it. How?

Future Tech

The most common solution put forth is that Santa has access to technological breakthroughs that allow him to manipulate physics to the point where presents could be delivered in the necessary time (.00076 seconds per house).

Santa would have to have some sort of time bubble, or time dilation field. Assuming Santa has the ability to slow down time for just him, this solves most other hurdles.

He no longer needs to hold 2377,780 metric tons — he can just go back and forth and do thousands of trips.
He no longer needs to be going at nearly the speed of light — he has time to go at a leisurely speed.
And at a leisurely speed and much less payload, he’ll no longer burn up in the atmosphere.

I’m unable to find a statistic for how many pounds a sleigh can support, but I’m assuming about 400kg. Subtracting the overweight Santa, we can carry 265kg per trip.

How Much Time Would Santa Need?

Assuming our standard “one lego set per child”, the 265kg will support 265 kids. At the average of 2.6 kids per house, that’s 102 homes per trip, for a total of 1,424,510 trips.

Assuming that Santa had the forethought to set up convenient storage spots all over the world, he won’t need to go back and forth to the North Pole for each trip, which would be tedious. This could be easily done compared to setting up time bubbles.

It’s terribly hard to get an actual number on how much distance Santa will cover over all of his trips, so we’ll use very rough estimates. Assuming all 145.3 million stops are spread evenly over the earth’s landmass, Santa must travel 1.03km per household — a total road trip of 149,350,000km — not including trips across oceans, feeding stops for the reindeer, bathroom breaks, etc.

Assuming Santa has modified his sleigh to travel at the leisurely speed of a commercial airliner, he would be covering 800 of those kilometers per hour. This would mean it would take Santa 4.635 seconds to travel from house to house, plus a generous five minutes to land, get in the house, drop off the presents, leave, and take off.

At roughly 304 seconds per house, that would require 44,171,200,000 seconds to preform the entire operation, which is 1400 years, 240 days, 17 hours, 46 minutes, 40 seconds. That’s how long the single Santa would need, per Christmas.

His sufficiently advanced time-bubble would dilate the 1.4 millenia into what people outside the bubble (everyone else) would perceive as just a single Christmas Eve.

Length of Santa’s Operation, Relative to Santa

No doubt, Santa would be busy. That’s a lot of work for a single Christmas.

Given that Santa started sometime around the year 300, that’s over 1700 Christmases, which would require Santa to have experienced (relatively) over 2.38 million years (2380 millenia) in his bubble while only two millenia occured outside his bubble.

The assumption that Santa is immortal is, of course, a given, as he is still operating today.

Needless to say, however, Santa is old. …Relatively.

The Possibility of a Time Bubble

The time bubble itself may be just as big of a physics hurdle as doing the entire operation in one single day. Yet, low level time dilation occurs all the time due to the theory of relativity — an interesting subject left for Wikpiedia articles.

Controlled time dilation is a different story, especially with no specific acceleration creating the bubble.

Yet, as far as physics is concerned, controlling time has not been specifically disproven, and thus remains in the realms of possibility.

Santa would have to be one heck of a scientific genius, though. Surely the time-bubble thing passed around is not the best solution available. Let’s look at something else.

Continued by A Solution to the Physics of Santa, Part III

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