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Santa: Man or Myth?
Let's examine the facts:
- There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the world. However,
since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Jewish or Buddhist religions,
this reduces the workload for Christmas night to 15% of the total, or 378 million
(according to the Population Reference Bureau). At an average (census) rate of 3.5
children per household, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming that there is at least
one good child in each.
- Santa has about 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 967.7 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian
household with a good child, Santa has around 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, hop
out, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under
the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump into
the sleigh and get on to the next house.
Assuming that each of these 108 million stops
is evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but will
accept for the purposes of our calculations), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per
household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stops or breaks.
This means 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, the Ulysses space probe,
moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15
miles per hour.
- The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child
gets nothing more than a medium sized Lego set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying over
500 thousand tons, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull
no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that the "flying" reindeer could pull ten
times the normal amount, the job can't be done with eight or even nine of them - Santa
would need 360,000 of them. This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the
sleigh, by another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth
(the ship, not the monarch).
- 600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance --- this
would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering the earth's
atmosphere. The lead pair of Reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per
second each. In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the
Reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer
team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa
reached the fifth house on his trip.
Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a
result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650 m.p.s. in .001 seconds, would be subjected
to centrifugal forces of 17,500 g's. A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim)
would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force, instantly crushing
his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo.
- Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.
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MY WITCH SHOP
