Is there a St. Claus ?
As a result of an overwhelming lack of requests, and with
research help from that reknowned scientific journal SPY magazine
(January, 1990) - I am pleased to present the annual scientific
inquiry into 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 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 seemes 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, 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" (see point #1) could pull TEN TIMES the normal
anount, 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 travelling at 650 miles per second creates enourmous
air resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as
spacecrafts 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,
expose 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.
Unfortunately I don't know who the author is. I received it once via email
from a good friend.
Secret services report from a successor of the old St. Claus. If you
want to see it click here.
Copyright by Rainer Klier
03-06-96; last update: Since someone switched the www-server from spinner to apache
without notifying the users, the spinnertags like
<modified> and <accessed> don't work anymore. Accessed: See 'last update' times.
If you find bugs in this page or just want to mail me, click here.