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. 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 two 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 to 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’s at least one good child in each.
3. Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with
This is due to 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 each second.
This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 0.001 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 into the sleigh and move on to the next house.
Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops is evenly distributed around the world (which isn’t true, but for argument’s sake we will accept), we are talking about 0.78 miles per household, a trip of 75.5 million miles – not counting stops to do what must of us do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding, etc.
So Santa’s sleigh must be moving at 650 miles a 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 a second. A conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.
4. The sleigh’s payload is an interesting element
Assuming that each child gets nothing heavier than a medium-sized Lego set (2 lb), 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 lb. Even granting that “flying reindeer” (see point 1 above) could pull 10 times the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine. We need 214,200. This increases the payload (not counting the weight of the sleigh) to 353,430 tons. This is four times the weight of the ocean-liner “Queen Elizabeth II”.
5. 353,000 tons travelling at 650 miles a second creates enormous air resistance
This will heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft 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 creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporised within 0.00426 of a second. Meanwhile Santa will be subject to forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250-lb Santa (seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 lb of force.
If Santa DID ever deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he’s dead now.
"Standing on your mother's corpse you told me that you'd wait forever." [Bryan Adams: Summer of 69]
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Originally Posted by Kwaka-Kid
:spudbooge
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