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How could Santa deliver the 3 billion or so presents on one night (the science of the thing!)

KAL 9000

By KAL 9000
in Science & Spaceflight

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Rakaydos

Rakaydos

Posted
Posted

Realistically, it's an inverted pyramid scheme.

Having promoted a season of giving, Santa outsources both the "sleeping/waking/bad/good" spycraft and the actual gift placement to agents placed close to the target. These agents are maintained in turn by gift delivery by other agents, and so on up. Santa himsef only gives gifts to his elves, the elves maintain the second tier of gift givers, all over the world, and the second tier on down is entirely human.

By this point, knowingly or otherwise, most of the adult population of regions that celebrate Christmas have been co-opted by Santa's scheme.

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cubinator

cubinator

Posted
Posted

Santa's sleigh has a negative mass field around it which slows time, and allows it to fly while carrying 3 billion kids' worth of presents. The presents are housed in a bag which expands into the fourth dimension to allow for more space. The bag effectively has a warp field, which Santa can use as a wormhole to move into your house without having to break anything. Santa uses the sleigh on Christmas to deliver presents, but the elves use it the rest of the year to gather information on every child and what they want.  

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problemecium

problemecium

Posted
Posted (edited)

People always seem to fixate on the logistics of there being a Santa Claus.

I, however, had a hypothesis from an early age that there was no "a" Santa Claus - there were lots of them! A whole army of Santa Clauses in fact. Every Santa Claus you saw at the mall was in fact the real Santa Claus, even if they were different people. Perhaps in the beginning there was a single Santa, but why wouldn't he expand his operation over time as the population and his consumer base grew, subcontracting increasing numbers of Santa Clauses and eventually passing on the torch and retiring a la the Dread Pirate Roberts?
With thousands of Santas, delivering toys to millions of kids would be easy - just send a whole fleet of sleighs from their various bases around the world in a big synchronized present-distribution operation.

Edited by parameciumkid
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RainDreamer

RainDreamer

Posted
Posted

If Santa has a space/time travel machine, and at the same time deliver gifts to all the kids in the world, it could mean a few things:

1. Space/Time travel does not result in split timelines: it is one thing to go through space/time to deliver gifts to a single kid, it is another to deliver it to the next kid without dropping in a timeline where the first kid still have that gift (it's entirely possible you may even get in a timeline where that kid doesn't exist). So perhaps there is only one timeline and Santa just travel along within it.

2. Space/time travel does result in split timelines , but Santa manages to deliver all the gifts to all the kids in all of multiverses. This is going to require the kind of effort we can't  even start to comprehend. Santa would have to deliver gifts all the time, to infinity and beyond.

3. Santa leaves behind multiverses of kids without gifts, in order to reach a timeline where all kids get their gift delivered.

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GeneralVeers

GeneralVeers

Posted
Posted

Not possible.

A couple decades ago (back when 9600 baud was considered bleeding fast!) somebody posted a proof, on a BBS, that Santa is impossible. The proof assumed X number of Christian children worldwide (I forget the number), each getting 2 pounds' weight in presents (the author used an average-size Lego set as the basis for that), tallied up the total mass of the presents, used X (the number of children to visit) to figure out the required average velocity to make the whole trip in one night, and came up with a final result of 650,000 reindeer required to pull the sleigh, at accelerations which violated Einstein's laws of relativity and at speeds which would have produced extremely violent sonic booms at low altitude and sufficient atmospheric friction to incinerate the reindeer.

It's not exactly your proudest moment when something disproving Santa Claus makes you fall out of your chair laughing. :lol:

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Tex_NL

Tex_NL

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Posted (edited)
15 hours ago, WedgeAntilles said:

Not possible.

A couple decades ago (back when 9600 baud was considered bleeding fast!) somebody posted a proof, on a BBS, that Santa is impossible. The proof assumed X number of Christian children worldwide (I forget the number), each getting 2 pounds' weight in presents (the author used an average-size Lego set as the basis for that), tallied up the total mass of the presents, used X (the number of children to visit) to figure out the required average velocity to make the whole trip in one night, and came up with a final result of 650,000 reindeer required to pull the sleigh, at accelerations which violated Einstein's laws of relativity and at speeds which would have produced extremely violent sonic booms at low altitude and sufficient atmospheric friction to incinerate the reindeer.

It's not exactly your proudest moment when something disproving Santa Claus makes you fall out of your chair laughing. :lol:

I remember that one. The final conclusion was also pretty funny: If Santa Clause has ever existed. He's now dead.

Edit: Look what I just found. A 20 year old WWW relic: http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~dufour/HUMOR/Santas.html

Quote

IS THERE A SANTA CLAUS?

As a result of an overwhelming lack of requests, and with research help from that renown scientific journal SPY magazine (January, 1990) - I am pleased to present the annual scientific inquiry into Santa Claus.

1) No known species of reindeer can fly. BUT 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 has ever seen.

2) There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. BUT since Santa doesn't (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total - 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there's at least one good child in each.

3) 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 stockings, 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 .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc.

This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 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, tops, 15 miles per hour.

4) The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (2 pounds), 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 that "flying reindeer" (see point #1) could pull TEN TIMES the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases 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 Queen Elizabeth.

5) 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per second. Each. In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.

In conclusion - If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's dead now.

 

Edited by Tex_NL
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