SANTA FAILED PHYSICS (and paid for it) Without permission to reprint and based on an overwhelming lack of requests, the following research is presented, summarized for reading enjoyment and satisfying your search for the truth. The age old question is posed "Is there a Santa Claus" - OF COURSE NOT you silly goof when you consider the following: 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, the DOES NOT COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer (which only Santa, a songwriter, and an animator or two have apparently seen.) 2. There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. BUT since Santa doesn't serve the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces his workload to 15% of the total - a mere 378 million according to a recent Population Reference Bureau report. At average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there's at least one "good" (according to mythical Santa standards) child in each home. 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 home visits per second. This means that for each Christian home with "good" children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, hop-out, slide down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining gifts under the tree, eat whatever "Santa snacks" that have been set-out, get back up the chimney, back in the sleigh, and then move on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (now there's a stretch assumption), we are now talking about .78 miles between homes. This would mean a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting stops to do what most do at least once or twice every 31 hours, plus reindeer feeding, etc. You get the point. SO...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 vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a pokey 27.4 miles per second and the fastest reindeer can run 17-20 miles per hour, tops. 4. The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium size Lego set (2 pounds each), 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 10 TIMES the normal amount, the job cannot be done with 8 or even 9 reindeer (even guided by some fictitious red LED luminated wonder mammal). No, Santa would need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload - not even including the weight of the sleigh - to 353,430 tons. For comparison - this weight is 4 times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth ocean liner. 5. 353,430 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance. This resistance 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 flames instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them to the same fate, creating sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500 times greater than gravity. A 250 - pound Santa (which seems ludicrously thin) 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, he's worm dirt now.
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