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Wednesday, 13 December 1995 |
As a result of an overwhelming lack of requests, and with research
help from that renowned scientific journal, SPY magazine
(January, 1990) --- I am pleased to present a scientific inquiry
into the existence of 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 (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.
- 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.
- 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" 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.
- 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous
air resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as
a spacecraft reentering 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
17,500.09 times greater than gravity.
- A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be
pinned to the backof 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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