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Santa Cannot Exist
As a result of an overwhelming lack of
requests, and with reserch help from that renown scientific
jounal SPY magazine (January, 1990) - I am pleased to present
the annual inquiry to Santa Claus.
- 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.
- There are 2 billion children (people
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 houshold, that's 91.8 million homes. One
presumes there's at least one good child in each.
- Santa has 31 of
Christmas to work with, thanks to the different
time-zones and the rotation of earth, assuming he
travels east to west (which seems logical). This
works out to 822.2 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 do at least
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, Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4
miles per second - a conventional reindeer ca run,
tops, 15 miles per hour.
- 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 321.30 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 weitght of the
sleigh - to 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison -
this is four times the weight of the Queen Elisabeth.
- 353,000 tons
travelling at 650 miles per second creates enoumous
air resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in
the same fashion as space-crafts 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 within 4.26 thousandths of
a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to
centrifugal forces 17,500.07 times greater than
gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seams 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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