Is There a Santa Clause?
(A Highly Scientific Thesis)
This page has been visited since May 20, 98
(A Highly Scientific Thesis)
This page has been visited since May 20, 98
2) There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. However, since Santa doesn't appear to handle most Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total -- 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average rate of 3.5 children per household (according to the census bureau), that makes 91.8 million homes. We'll presume that there is 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. In other words, for each Christian household with good children Santa has 1/1000th of a second to:
1.park,
2.hop out of the sleigh,
3.jump down the chimney,
4.fill the stockings,
5.distribute the remaining presents under the tree,
6.eat whatever snacks have been left,
7.get back up the chimney,
8.get back into the sleigh, and
9.move on to the next house.
Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course is false but for the purpose of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours. This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, or 3000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man made vehicle ever invented, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second. A conventional reindeer can only run 15 miles per hour, tops.
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 already overweight and stuffed by the end of the night with milk and cookies from 91.8 million homes. On land a conventional team of reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that "flying reindeer" can pull ten times that amount, Santa needs 214,200 reindeer to do the job. This increases the payload -- not even counting the weight of the sleigh itself--to 353,430 tons. Again, for purposes of comparison, this is four times the weight of the cruise ship Queen Elizabeth II.
5) 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance, which will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as a spacecraft reentering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will each absorb 14.3 quintillion (14,300,000,000,000,000,000) joules of energy per second, instantaneously bursting into flames, creating deafening sonic booms in their wake, and exposing the reindeer following them to the same forces. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Meanwhile, Santa will be subjected to acceleration forces over 17,500 times greater than gravity. A 250 pound Santa will be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.
The only sound conclusion from the above is, if Santa ever did deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's now certainly dead.