Is There A Santa Claus?
1. 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.
2. There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the
world. But since Santa doesn't (appear) to handle the
Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, and Buddhist children, that reduces
the workload to 15% of the total - 378 million according to
the Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate
of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes.
One presumes there is at least one good child in each home.
3. Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to
the different time zones and the rotation of the Earth,
assuming he travels East to West (which seems logical). This
works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that
for each Christian household with good children, Santa has
1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump
down the chimney, fill the stockings (with care), distribute
the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks
have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the
sleigh, and move on to the next house. Assuming that each of
these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the
Earth (which, of course, we know this to be false, but for
the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now
talking about .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 and etc. This
means that 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 on Earth, the Ulysses space
probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second. A conventional
reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.
4. The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting
element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a
medium-sized LEGO set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying
321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably
described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can
pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that "flying
reindeer" (see point #1) could pull TEN TIMES the normal
amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine. We
need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload - not even
counting the weight of the sleigh - to 353,430 tons. Again,
for comparison - this is four times the weight of the Queen
Elizabeth (the ship, not the sovereign.)
5. 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates
enormous air resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in
the same fashion as spacecraft re-entering the Earth's
atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3
QUINTRILLION joules of energy per second. Each, in short
will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the
reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in
their wake. The entire team would be vaporized within 4.26
thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected
to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than Earth's
gravity. A 250 pounds Santa (which seems ludicrously slim)
would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015
pounds of force.
In conclusion, if Santa ever DID deliver presents on
Christmas Eve, he's dead now.
So There. |
