Scientfic enquiry into Santy

Tree

Warning - you are advised that the following may contain certain
facts (or
spoilers, if you will) that may ruin your Christmasses for ever more.


Does Santa exist?

As a result of an overwhelming lack of requests, and with research
help from
that renown scientific journal - 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 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 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's
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 valorised 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.

Mmmm... but remember kids, when you stop believing in Santa is when
you start
getting clothes for Christmas...



Merry Christmas.