Is There a Santa Claus?
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Emailed to me from another humor list.
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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 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 &
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.
This is due 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/second.
This is to say that for each Christian household with good children,
Santa has .001 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/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, plus feeding & etc.
So Santa's sleigh must be moving at 650 miles/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/second.
A conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles/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 lb.), 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 lb. Even granting that "flying reindeer" (see #1) could
pull 10 TIMES the normal amount, we cannot do the job with 8, or even 9
reindeer. We need 214,200. This increases the payload
- not counting the weight of the sleigh - to 353,430 tons. This is four
times the weight of the ocean-liner Queen Elizabeth.
5) 353,000 TONS TRAVELING AT 650 MILES/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 creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team
will be vaporized within .00426 of a second. Meanwhile, Santa, will be
subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A
250-lb. Santa (seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his
sleigh by 4,315,015 lb. of force.
If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's dead now.
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Comments, suggestions, flames, etc.
tellswor@slonet.org
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