Hey everyone! So it's that time of year
again when we all start wandering the
most important thing about Christmas.
With nearly two billion children in the
world, how does Santa deliver all the presents?
Here is a video explaining how. They are
currently 7.4 billion people
In the world. Twenty-six percent are children
which leaves us with 1.9 billion
children awaiting their presents on
Christmas Eve. At an average of three
children per home, Santa needs to get to 630 million
houses. That's a heckuva lot of stops in
one night. But luckily due to the rotation
of the earth and different time zones, he gets full 31 hours.
So to deliver all the presents he
needs to visit 5600 homes per second.
This is in less than 0.2 milliseconds to
stop the reindeer, climb down the chimney,
deliver the presents, stock up on
snacks, get back up the chimney and then
get moving to the next house. Now the
area of land on Earth is 510 million square
kilometres, and for the sake of our
calculation let's assume the houses are evenly spread out. This
gets us the distance of 0.8 kilometers
between each home, which means that
is Santa delivers to every one of them
which of course he will, he needs to
travel a total distance of 500 million
kilometers. Three times the distance from
the earth to the Sun. That means that he
needs to travel at a speed of 4,500
km/s. Thirteen hundred times faster than
the fastest jet plane and thirteen
thousand times faster than the speed of
sound. So if this didn't already seem
like a super difficult task,
let's take a moment to think about the
payload. Let's say that each present weighs
around one kilogram, the average weight
of a medium lego box. So not including
Santa himself who has been said to be
quite voluptuous, the sleigh weighs 1.9
billion kilos. About as heavy as 40
Titanics. The average reindeer can
pull 150 kilos, about the weight of a
giant panda, which is pretty impressive,
but we still need 13 million of them to
pull this sleigh. This adds another 1.6 billion
kilos, leaving us with a total payload
of 2.5 billion kilograms, around the
weight of a few skyscrapers. 2.5 billion
kilos traveling at four
thousand five hundred kilometers per
second would create an enormous amount
of air resistance, burning up those
reindeer in the same way as a meteor
entering the atmosphere. As
Santa is thrust back in his seat, he'd be
subject to centrifugal forces several
thousand times that of gravity.
Needless to say he'd be instantly
jellified. Sorry if I'm ruining Christmas. But this
can't be happening I mean where all the
presents coming from? Some think that
Santa must use some kind of advanced heat
protective shield for his reindeer and sleigh,
kind of like the ones we use on space
capsules to stop them burning up. This
would solve the heat problem, but what
about the fact that santa needs to be up
and down your chimney in less than point
two milli seconds?
I mean he doesn't exactly look like the
fastest guy on his feet.
One theory is that if Santa has the
technology to make this super heat
resistant shield, he should also have
technology advanced enough to travel at
nearly the speed of light.
This actually solves a lot of problems.
For one, by traveling this fast, Santa would
be able to complete his around-the-world
trip in just 500 seconds, so there'd be
plenty of time left over for stuffing
his face with milk and cookies.
This would also explain why Santa never seems
to get any older with each passing year.
Einstein's theory of special relativity tells
us that the faster you travel the more
time slows down. This is called time
dilation and it happens because the
speed of light in a vacuum is always
constant no matter how you're looking at it. So
if Santa is traveling at nearly the
speed of light, time is going a lot
slower for him than it is for us. Meaning that he
ages a lot more slowly
than we do. Of course he'd have to be traveling
that fast for a lot longer than one
night for these kinds of anti-aging
processes to apply, but hey who knows
what he's doing the other 364 days of
the year up in the North Pole. Santa
traveling at nearly the speed of light
would also solve the problem of how he
and his big belly fit down your chimney
every year. Special relativity also tells
us that objects traveling close to the
speed of light experience length
contraction. In other words: they get skinnier.
The faster they move the skinnier they get.
So from our point of view, not that we
should be watching, Santa can slide down
our chimney with ease.
Finally, Santa's lightning speed would
explain why no one has ever seen him
flying across the night sky. When charged
objects travel faster than the speed of
light in a media, they emit a blue glow
known as Cherenkov radiation. I think I said that right. Here,
Santa is our charged object and our medium is air.
So nothing travels faster than the
speed of light in a vacuum but in air, light
travels at 99.97% of its speed.
So if Santa were traveling at 99.99% of
the speed of light he would be traveling
faster than the speed of light in air.
The Cherenkov radiation would cause him
to glow and he'd be seen as a streak of
blue light shooting across the night sky.
So if you ever see streaks of light
in the night sky on Christmas Eve, you
know who it is.
How do you think Santa delivers all our
presents? I would love to hear your
theories in the comments
below. And apart from that Merry
Christmas and have a safe and happy
holiday. Bye!