Is
There a Santa Claus?
As a result of an
overwhelming lack of requests, and with research help from that renown scientific journal SPY magazine (January,
1990) - I am pleased to present the annual scientific inquiry into 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 cihldren,
that reduces the workload to to 15% of the total - 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children
per household, that's 91.8 million homes.
One presumes there's at least one
good child in each.
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 seemes
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, 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 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 75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us
must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding 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 anount, 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.
5)
353,000 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates enourmous
air resistance - this
will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecrafts
re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The
lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3
QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per
second. Each.
In short, they will burst into
flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and
create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer
team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second.
Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06
times greater than
gravity. A 250-pound 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.
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