As a result of an overwhelming lack of requests,
and with research help from that renowned scientific journal SPY magazine
(January, 1991) - 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 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.
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 almostinstantaneously, 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.