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Is There A Santa Claus?
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 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 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.
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 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 pokey 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 amount, 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 enormous air resistance - this
will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as 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 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!
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MY WITCH SHOP
