I was clearing out my old school Emails when I came across this from last Christmas from my head of 6th Form.
Santa, presumably on his way to the depot to pick up another 6,999,994 hypersonic space reindeer and a significantly larger sleigh
In a strangely paradoxical piece of news, Father Christmas has been fired for telling children that Father Christmas doesn't exist.
It seems a bit harsh to fire an elderly man just for having an existential crisis. Do I exist? Do you? Is the external world real, or merely an illusion brought on by too many sherries? Is sherry itself an illusion?
But the truth about Father Christmas is far stranger, far more incredible, than a mere ontological problem. I happened to do some hard-hitting investigative work, a few years ago, into the life of Saint Nick, and learned a few facts about his difficult Christmas Eve. (Note: if your children are reading this, while I can reassure them that Father Christmas is of course real, you might want them to stop reading just before the end.)
For a start, he works harder than most. Assuming that he visits the homes of all the Christian children worldwide, that each household has three children, and that those households are evenly distributed around a 2D Earth's surface, Big Poppa C will have to travel a total of 212,030,000 miles*. Since he has 32 hours to do it (travelling east-to-west with the Sun, and assuming children sleep eight hours a night, he's got 24 hours plus eight), that works out as a nippy 1,800 miles per second, near enough. That is, for comparison, about 41 times faster than the Helios 2 space probe, the fastest man-made object ever, and we're not even taking into account toilet breaks. He will be a tired, confused man by the end of that. Who can blame him if he doesn't know whether he's real anymore?
And it's not as if that's all the poor chap has gone through. Every household, in a spirit of misguided kindness, will leave him a mince pie and a glass of sherry. His calorific intake is bad enough – I worked it out as more than 71 million calories, assuming Co-Op Own Brand mince pies and standard sherry, which would require a 450 million mile walk on Christmas day to burn off. But he'll also consume a not unimpressive 233,000,000 units of alcohol, putting him more than 58 million times the Department of Health's legal driving limits. Not only will he be he extremely drunk by Christmas morning, he'll probably be quite worried about losing his sleigh licence.
His financial woes are presumably getting to him as well this year. When I first looked into it, he had spent £30,093,000,000 on 700 million brand new Optimus Primes, which in 2009 was what all the kids wanted. (He couldn't get his elves to make them, obviously, because otherwise Mattel would sue the red fur-lined pants off him.) But this year it's all about the Wii-U, I gather, which at £250 a crack pushes his outlay up to £175 billion. It's more than the GDP of Qatar. In these financially straitened times, that will surely sink the fragile Arctic economy. It's also twice as heavy: 3.41lb per Wii-U, instead of 1.45lb for Optimus, so a grand total of 1,193,500 tons of presents. Not only will that strain his back loading the sled, he'll have to hire more reindeer as well: each is capable of pulling about 330lb, so he'll need about seven million – four million more than he used in 2009, each of which he'll have to train to fly at nearly one per cent of light speed. It's a stressful process. No wonder he drinks.
The whole thing will weigh about 3.3 million tons, assuming sled and Santa are weightless. (In fact, the mass of the whole reindeer-sled-presents-Santa system will be around 1.0000467 times that, as it gains weight through the workings of relativity, but let's not get pedantic.) The energy required to get that amount of mass up to the hypersonic speeds required would require about 1,400 trillion gigajoules of energy, or 388,888 terawatt hours, assuming they're travelling in a vacuum (it would make sense to be travelling in space, to avoid atmospheric drag). For comparison, the total worldwide fossil, renewable and nuclear energy use in 2008 was about 143,000 terawatt hours.
I was considering working out what the carbon footprint of seven million reindeer passing wind would be, but there's really no need. According to this space-object impact calculator I found online**, within milliseconds of the sled re-entering the atmosphere to deliver its first present, it would explode in a nuclear fireball the equivalent of three million tons of TNT, and would knock down major buildings and give people third-degree burns 60 miles away. Any reindeer flatus that may or may not have built up is not going to significantly affect the environmental damage caused by what will probably amount to a fairly major global extinction event.
No wonder, then, Father Christmas is having a tough time at the moment. He's facing the very real possibility of being blown to plasma in a few short hours' time. Really, the last thing he needs is to lose his job as well.
*This was back in 2009, obviously, and I've just realised I haven't updated the figures for the extra children in the world now. It was around 2 billion then; I think I saw an estimate of 2.2 billion for 2012. If you can face going through all the working for me, I'll update it. Probably.
**I've assumed, on no real factual basis, that reindeer and Wii-Us have roughly the same density as ice and the whole thing would hit the atmosphere at 45 degrees. Also, it's a spherical sleigh. Look, I'm doing what I can here.
Merry Christmas
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Topic: Things that made you laugh today: some people notice when 1 change the title (Read 1566084 times)