In the spirit of both Christmas and science, today we put Santa and his reindeer against scientific scrutiny! Below is my adaptation of Richard Waller's original set of Christmas calculations appearing in Spy Magazine twenty years ago. To admit that the ruminations below were occupying my bewildered mind as a child might have all of you seeking to provide me gift certificates for professional help, but here goes!
1) No known species of reindeer can fly. However, there are likely hundreds of thousands of species of living organisms yet to be classified. Therefore, we cannot completely rule out flying reindeer. Unfortunately, many biodiversity groups report that species extinction is occurring 1000 times faster than the rate at any point in our recorded history, especially in the Arctic. In other words, if flying reindeer do exist, an ever-increasing human population and climate change may render them extinct soon anyway.
Biodiversity Extinction Hot Spots from MongaBay
2) Of the 6.7 billion people on our planet, 1.2 billion are under the age of ten. Santa doesn't appear to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Islam, Jewish, or Buddhist children and that reduces the workload to about 33% of the total - or about 396 million children. At a worldwide average rate of 3 children per household, that's 132 million homes waiting for Santa on Christmas. One presumes there's at least one good child in each.
NASA's Cloud-Free Satellite Montage of City Lights at Night.
3) Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, and assuming he travels east to west. That means Santa must visit 4.3 million homes every hour, or 1182 homes every second. That gives the rotund Saint Nick 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 cookies, drink milk, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house.
Assuming that each of these 132 million homes are right next door to one another (They're not, but I figure highly populated areas like the high rise apartments of Mexico City might balance the expanse of say, rural Nebraska.) means a total trip of about 10 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us have to do at least once every 31 hours. Maybe Santa has NASA engineers on staff and an astronaut-like flight suit! If such a suit exists, I have never seen him wear it.
This means that Santa's sleigh has to travel a whopping 322,580 miles per hour, or 90 miles per second. Those of you that count to five while waiting for thunder after you see lightning already know that the speed of sound is 0.2 miles per second. In other words, add "Supersonic" to Santa's various nicknames. By the way, a conventional reindeer can run 15 miles per hour, and that is without hauling cargo.
Arctic Reindeer
4) Speaking of cargo, the payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a Nintendo Wii console and the Super Smash Bros. Brawl game, the sleigh will weigh at least 396,000 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. That means the storied nine flying reindeer of Santa-fame would have to pull a weight that would take 2.6 million reindeer to pull on land. By the way, that sack of toys is the same weight as the U.S. Navy Nimitz-class aircraft supercarriers Truman, Reagan, Bush and Ford - combined!
U.S. Navy Supercarrier the U.S.S. Gerald Ford (photo credit: US Navy)
5) 396,000 tons traveling at 90 miles per second through the atmosphere would create a tremendous amount of friction. This friction will heat the reindeer up in the same way that spacecraft heat up re-entering the earth's atmosphere.
NASA Schematic of Space Capsule Re-entry
The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 1 quintillion joules of energy per second! Each! In short, they will burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and so on, until getting to Santa and the sleigh. The entire team will be vaporized within 4 thousandths of a second.
Waller concluded in his article that if Santa ever did deliver presents on Christmas, he's dead now.
I would prefer to call it a miracle, and like all of you, I can't wait until Thursday morning!
Santa and List (photo credit J. Bravo)
Merry Christmas!
