IS THERE REALLY A SANTA CLAUS?

As a result of an overwhelming lack of requests, and with research help from

that renown 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 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 traveling 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.