Off Topic but a bit science related! LOL

There are approximately 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world.

However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist religions, this reduces the workload for Christmas night to 15% of the total, or 378 million (according to the Population Reference Bureau, whoever they are). At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per house hold, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming that there is at least one good child in each.

Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, logically assuming he travels east to west. This works out to 967.7 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with a good child, Santa has around 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh and get on to the next house.

Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but, hey; work with me here), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stops or breaks. This means Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second --- 3,149 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles per hour.

The payload of 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 over 500 thousand tons, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that the "flying" reindeer could pull 10 times the normal amount, the job can't be done with 8 or even 9 of them --- Santa would need 360,000 of them. This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, another 54,000 tons, or roughly 7 times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch).

We know that 600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance --- this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each.

In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously (i.e. explode and vaporize in such a way as to make flash paper jealous), exposing the reindeer behind them and creating deafening (earth-shattering..... literally) sonic booms in their wake.

The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or just before Santa reached the 5th house on his trip. Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650 miles per second in .001 seconds, would be subjected to centrifugal forces of 17,500 G's. A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim based on the Coca-cola ads) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of red goo.

In short ......... if Santa ever really existed, he's dead now. Merry Christmas

-- http://www.cynthiablue.net http://www.utahdogs.com http://www.animalfoster.com

Hi Patrick, the moon view sounds much more exciting, because we might see features on the moon and woudln't worry about eye damage. Please let me know whenever you figure one out! Best wishes, Joe