IJMC - Here it Goes Again.

This shows up every year. I don't care, I still believe in Santa Claus. 
Even if I haven't gotten what I wanted for about 21 years now, I still 
have faith!							  -dave




                        IS THERE A 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.

Have a nice day.