Is Santa Dead? Hell no, he's just waaay ahead of us.

By now, you've all seen this:

WARNING! DO NOT READ IF YOU STILL BELIEVE IN SANTA CLAUSE! A physical one anyway, still fully believe in a symbolic Santa Clause deep in most peoples heart.

Santa can't exist.

There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist religions (except maybe in Japan), this reduces the workload for Christmas night to 15% of the total,or 378 million (according to the population reference bureau). At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming 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, assuming east to west (which seems logical). 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 his sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stocking, 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 onto 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 will accept for the purposes of our calculations), 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 that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second,3000 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 (two 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 can pull 10 times the normal amount, the job can't be done with eight or even nine 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 seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship not the monarch).

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, exposing the reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about the same time that Santa reached the fifth house on his trip.

Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650 m.p.s. in 0.001 seconds, would be subjected to acceleration forces of 17,000 g's. A 250pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) 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 pink goo.

Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.

Bah; the problem with that theory is this:
If santa is able to create all those toys, etc. then he must have a pretty damn high-tech shop.
Therefore it can be supposed that, in order to be able to have all the LATEST toys en masse before Christmas, MUST be ahead of us technilogically.

This is evident in his either 1. "Pocket dimension" 2. "Dimension Door" (stealing terms from D&D), or (the one I like the best) 3. Nanotech manufactory "magic sack." How else could one explain his ability to carry all the necessary toys (and coal) in a sack he can sling over his back? (Simple; keep a large mass of extremely dense material on board the sleigh. After several stops, when the manufactory bag is out of materials, refill with another "brick" of material and continue.)

Now, to extrapolate- if Santa has tech of this level, what prevents him from having tech to 1. shield his sleigh and (obviously FTL/Time-affecting drives) "Reindeer" from debris/Atmosphere?

And from the reindeer- it is CLEAR from your previous post that Santa is capable of FTL travel and/or controlled Time Dilation. (Which leads BACK to the sack; if the material is dense enough, it could be causing said dilation; maybe a manufactured, well-controlled singularity? Mayhaps the Sack itself is the source of Santa's time dilation?)

Anyway; so it would be safe to assume that he would have technology allowing the manipulation of Inertia (which is theorized in Alastair Reynolds' Redemption Ark/Revelation Space/Absolution Gap series to be an effect of the Quantum foam) so that the jumps from house to house could be acheived at 1 G, rather than the standard Santa-crushing 17,000 G's?

Thus, with his Time-dilating controlled singularity nano-manufactory sack, Santa and his FTL-drive reindeer could EASILY pull off Christmas, with time left over for... "Quality time" with the Mrs.

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