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KIDS, NEVER ASK YOUR DAD ABOUT SANTA CLAUS IF HE'S AN ENGINEER:
I. 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.
II. There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the world.
However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, 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.
III. 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, about 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.
IV. 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 500,000 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, another 54,000 tons, or
roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ocean liner, not the monarch).
V. 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.
VI. Therefore, if Santa ever did exist, he's dead now.
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