iEaster

As Easter has just passed, it has been a tradition for many European countries that a cute little bunny with a basket full of chocolate eggs will hopping around the world delivering nice little chocolate eggs to all over the world. Now isn’t that such a sweet sweet chocolate-dreamy like dream?

Not.

It’s pretty stupid and absurd if one thinks about it. I mean seriously, A BUNNY jumping all over the world? Delivering Chocolate eggs? Firstly, bunnies do not go to supermarkets therefore how the heck does “it” get the chocolate eggs, it does not produce eggs either let alone chocolate ones. Well, while thinking about it, I was thinking about his nearest “cousin” namely: Santa Claus who does almost the same thing except at a totally different time which most of us I assure you do fondly remember called Christmas time. Now, lets look in a scientific way about Santa… (got most from the net actually)

Firstly there has been no known species of reindeer that can fly. However, there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not completely rule out flying reindeer which only Santa, his wife (Mrs Santa) and his elves has seen. Next, there is an incredible estimation of 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. But since Santa doesn’t – apparently – handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children and other non-Christian religions since that makes you bad, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total – a mere 378 million (according to the Population Census Bureau). This gives us an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that’s 91.8 million homes across the world. Now, let’s just presume there is at least one good child to each home.

Now 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. It’s not 24 hours since it is night at one place e.g. USA whereas its day in another e.g. Australia. This works out to an average of 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 stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat/drink whatever snacks or milk have been left, get back up the chimney, get into the sleigh, and move on to the next house. Now Santa sure going to turn thin by the end of the day, great fat-burning method seriously. (Now Santa is probably so fat just like other creatures in cold weather, I believe its called blubber in whales, to keep him warm in the cold cold North pole.)

Assuming that these 91,800,000 (Ninety one Million and Eight Hundred thousand) stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but which for purposes of our calculations we shall accept it making it so much easier), we are now talking about 0.76 miles per household, a total trip of 75,500,000 (Seventy five Million and five Hundred thousand) miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours such has shitting, bathing and other assorted stuff. I would really hate to receive something from him on second thought, just the smell would kill me. This means that Santa’s sled is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times faster than the speed of sound which is 330m/sec. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a lousy 27.4 miles per second. A conventional/normal reindeer can run at tops, 15 miles per hour. Wonderful flying reindeers. Amazing!

Next comes the weight, something most people may have forgotten already. The payload on the sleigh is another interesting element seriously. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized Lego set (2 pounds which is equivalent to 0.90718 kg thus roughly 1kg), the results in the sleigh carrying a whooping 321,300 tons, not inclusive of good old Santa, who has been invariably described as overweight. On land, conventional/normal reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds (136.07771 kg which I’ll round up to 150kg actually since 2 pounds is roughly 1 kg). Even granting the ability of ‘flying reindeer’ (see top) to pull perhaps ten times the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight or even nine flying reindeers (one of the we would know as Rudolph the red nose reindeer) . We need much much MUCH more. Actually, we need a total of 214,191 more, amounting to a total of 214,200 reindeer. Nice! This increases the payload – not counting the weight of the sleigh – to 353,420 tons. Again, for comparison, this is four times the weight of the ocean liner Queen Elizabeth.

This crazy amount of 353,000 tons of mass traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance, which will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecraft re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14,300,000,000,000,000,000 (14.3 quintillion) joules of energy (I had never gone past the zillion number: million, billion, trillion, zillion…). Per second. Each. Thus, in short, they will almost instantaneously burst into flames, exposing the reindeer behind them, who will repeat the process, and they will also create deafening sonic booms in their wake. This perhaps is the first fireworks in the western world! The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. An old jolly Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to acceleration forces of 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250-pound (113.39809 kg about 125kg) Santa which seems ludicrously slim since his been depicted as a insanely overweight beer belly fat ass man would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds (1.957, 257.8804 kg or roughly more than 2 million kg) of force. I can’t imagine his fat cheeks flabbing from that force, hahaha!

Thus in conclusion, if Santa ever did deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he is obviously dead by now.

Please people who have read this, do not go screaming and whining to me that I have just ruined your dream and start saying I’ll get a lousy lump of coal in my stockings this year (like sif I even have one at all) for this. And no, I’ll not get a bag full of it either. To those who insist Santa still does exist and have prove by having disappeared snacks, well science can’t prove everything can it? This was not meant to convert people into my thinking btw, so pls don debate over it with me.

Soooooo, IF Santa can’t do it, how the heck does a lousy hopping bunny with no flying reindeers do the job of delivering chocolate eggs around the world?