IS THERE A SANTA CLAUS???
No known species of reindeer can fly. BUT there are 300,000 species of
living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are
insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer
which only Santa has ever seen.
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 (except maybe in Japan) religions, 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 1/1000 th of a second to park the 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 Santa's sleigh is moving at 650
miles per second--3,000 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).
A mass of nearly 600,000 tons travelling 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 time 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 .001 seconds, would be
subjected to acceleration forces of 17,000 g's. A 250 pound Santa (which
seems ludicrously slim considering all the high calorie snacks he must
have consumed over the years) 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!!
Merry Christmas |
