Santa-Mas calculations for the jolly.
Q. Dear Plebeian how fast does Santa have to go in order to visit each of the world's households on Christmas?
A. Santa has to travel about 6.72 billion miles in 24 hours or at about 280 million kilometers an hour that's a little over 174 million miles per hour on average if he doesn't stop. By comparison the speed of sound is 1.2 million km/h and the speed of light is about 1080 million km/hr. On average he must visit 160,200 per second without stopping.
My rough estimation was as follows:
There are approximately 1.4 billion households world wide. Treating the earth as a smooth sphere, with a radius of 6, 6371 km, the surface area (4*pi*r^2) is about 80060.03472 km^2, but only 30% of that is land. So, roughly speaking, disregarding transcontinental travel, he has to cover a surface area of about 24018.1042 km^2. Now the the distance between individual households will vary, but we can roughly average out the distances by thinking of the households as being equidistant from one another i.e. on the vertices of a large grid of equilateral triangles. This puts each household roughly 4.8 km apart. This simplification would suggest that Santa has to travel about 6.72 billion miles in 24 hours or at about 280 million kilometers an hour that's a little over 174 million miles per hour on average if he doesn't stop.
Implications
Even with all of his elven magic it seems unlikely that he would be able to fit it all into one 24 hour period. From the number of Santa sighting in the world it is clear that he must travel much slower than our estimates. If we allow him to a 1 minute stop per household and an average of a minute to travel between households on average he could make 30 stops per hour. This is still pretty elfing fast and would require magic reindeer, etc.If he works 24 hours non-stop that would allow him to make 720 stops in a single day. So technically, when we say Santa we are probably really talking about a Santa class elves. The whole Santa operation would require 1,944,445 santas to deliver world wide utilizing about 17, 500, 000 magical reindeer. This may also explain the the New York garbage strike of January 1981, when sanitation workers went on strike over their working conditions could it have really been a refusal to deal with magical reindeer droppings on the street? It is hard to say for sure because Charles Dawkins as well as other politicos in the scientific community are still refusing to acknowledge the existence of elves, saying they can't be explained by evolution.
