IS THERE A SANTA CLAUS?
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As a result of an overwhelming lack of requests, and with research help form that renowned scientific journal, Spy Magazine, (January, 1990), I am pleased to present the annual scientific inquiry into Santa Clause:
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 entirely rule out flying reindeer, which only Santa has ever seen.
2) There are 2 billion Children (persons under the age of 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 or 378 million according the Population Reference Bureau, 1990. At an average rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes that 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 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 his sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute gifts 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, (which we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations will accept anyway), we are now talking about 0,78 miles per household, a total trip of 75,5 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us do at least once in 31 hours after consuming countless snacks.
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 (besides Santa's sleigh), is the Ulysses space probe. It moves along 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 lbs) the sleigh is carrying 321.300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably describes 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 reindeer. We need 214.200 reindeer. This increases the payload – not even counting the sleigh – to 353.430 tons.
Again for comparison, this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.
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 a spacecraft re-entering the 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, creating a deafening sonic boom 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 17,000,06 times greater than gravity. A 250 lb Santa, (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4.315.015 lbs of force.
The conclusion:
If Santa ever DID deliver presents to all the good little boys and girls on Christmas Eve, He's dead now.
Merry Christmas to all, and to all a Good-night!
