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Is there really a Santa Cluas?
I can't even remember where I got this it was so long ago. Enjoy..
As a result of an overwhelming lack of requests, and with research help from that renowned 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 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 & Buddist children, that reduses 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.
3) Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with. This is due 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/second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has .001 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 what ever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house. Asumming 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/household, a total trip of 75.5 million miles; not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least every 31 hours, plus feeding etc. So Santa's sleigh must be moving at 650 miles/second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. For puposes of camparison, the fastest man-made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves a poky 27.4 miles/second. A conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles/hour.
4) The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each chilg gets noting more 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 reindeercan pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that "flying reindeer" (see #1) could pull 10 times the nrmal amount, we cannot do the job with 8, or even 9 reindeer. 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.
5) 353,000 tons travelling at 650 miles/second creates enormous air resistance. This will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as a spacecraft reentering 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 flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within .00426 of a second. Meanwhile, Santa, will be subjected to centripetal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250-lb Santa (seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 lb. of forse.
If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's dead now!!!!!
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