Remember kids - it's a common misconception that santa flies along being towed by reindeer the entire way - reindeer are actually incapable of sustaining thrust for such a long journey.
In actuality, santa uses the reindeer as a booster to enter low-earth orbit, then the spent reindeer are detached to safely burn up upon re-entry into the earth's atmosphere. Santa can make his present deliveries as he orbits the earth and then he has ~11 months for his orbit to decay enough for him to return to the planet for the cycle to repeat again next year!
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from Flyingfirepig@lgbtqia.space
ICBM - Interstellar Christmas Benevolence Machine 🎁
"But Rose, how does Santa change his orbital inclination? And how does he throw the presents with such accuracy that they fall down the chimney without being damaged by the impact or by re-entry to the atmosphere?"
Ah, well that's just magic
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from Flyingfirepig@lgbtqia.space
@Flyingfirepig MIRV technology. Repurposed for positive purposes
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from Nikkileah@mendeddrum.org
@Flyingfirepig The bit about Rudolph's nose glowing is true though. Briefly.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from parsingphase@m.phase.org
@Flyingfirepig "then the spent reindeer are detached to safely burn up upon re-entry into the earth's atmosphere"
this part destroyed me 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from koppanyh@mastodon.social
@Flyingfirepig This has been floating around on the internet for decades. Today I gave it a badly-overdue copyedit:
No known species of #reindeer can fly. But there are at least 300,000 species of living organism yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not rule out flying reindeer which only #SantaClaus has ever seen.
There are some two billion children (persons under 18) in the world. But since Santa doesn't appear to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist, other-religion, or atheist children, his workload is about 15 per cent of the total—378 million or so. At an average of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes; one presumes there's at least one good child in each.
Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of Earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second. So for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 0.0012 second to park, hop out 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 in the sleigh, and move on to the next house. Assuming these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around Earth (false, but we'll accept it for our calculations), 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 must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding the reindeer, etc.
This means Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, or 2.34 million miles per hour; that is 3,051 times the speed of sound in air. For comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second (9,864 miles per hour). A conventional reindeer can run maybe 15 miles per hour, tops.
If each of the 91.8 million homes were to put out a single chocolate chip cookie and an 8-ounce glass of 2% milk, Santa's total intake would be approximately 225 calories per house. Times 91.8 million houses is a total of 20.66 billion calories.
It is said (falsely, but here again, let's use it for calculations) that 3,500 calories will create a pound of body fat. Dividing the 20.66 billion total calories by 3,500 would mean Santa gains 5,901,429 pounds—or 2,951 tons.
The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons. That's not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that a theoretical 'flying reindeer' could pull ten times the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight of them; We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload—not even counting the weight of the sleigh—to 353,430 tons. That is four times the weight of the ocean liner RMS Queen Elizabeth.
353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second would create enormous air resistance, which would heat up the reindeer in the same manner as spacecraft re-entering Earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy. Per second. Each. They would burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and creating deafening sonic booms. The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 0.00426 second.
Santa, meanwhile, would be subjected to forces 17,500 times greater than gravity; a 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by over four million (4,315,015) pounds of force.
All of which to say: if #Santa ever delivered presents on Christmas Eve as popularly held, he's dead now.
=> More informations about this toot | More toots from isocat@tiggi.es This content has been proxied by September (ba2dc).Proxy Information
text/gemini