from the firing line…

This was sent to me and I thought I would share it with you. Enjoy!

by Pastor Al Hughes

Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones

and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems

logical). 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 stocking, 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, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations

we will accept), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household, a total

trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us do at least

once every 31 hours, plus feeding, etc.

That means that Santa’s sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3000 times

the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle on

earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second – a

conventional reindeer can run, at tops 25-30 miles per hour.

The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming each child

gets nothing more than a medium sized LEGO set (2 Ibs), the sleigh is carrying

321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight.

On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting

the “flying reindeer” can pull TEN TIMES that normal amount, we cannot do the job

with eight, or even nine-we need 214,200 reindeer. This increased the payload, not

even counting the weight of the sleigh, to 353,430 tons. Again for comparison, this

is four times the weight of the HMS Queen Elizabeth.

353,000 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance.

This will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecrafts re-entering the

earth’s atmosphere. The lead pair will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy

per second, each. In short, they will burst into flames almost instantaneously,

exposing the reindeer behind them, and creating a deafening sonic boom in their

wake.

The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second.

Santa meanwhile, will be subject to centrifugal forces of 17,500.06 times greater

than gravity. A 250 Ib. Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to

the back of the sleigh by a 4,315,015 pound force.

In conclusion, if Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he is now dead.