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 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 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.
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, 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 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.
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 anoint, 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.
353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates
enormous 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.
