I posted this last year but, since then, I?ve been checking up more carefully on the facts. As I was once a scientist I have a certain scepticism that has finally convinced me that Santa Claus DOES NOT EXIST. I?m sorry if this comes as a shock to some of you but as you get your presents anyway – stop whining!
Here?s my reasoning.
No known species of reindeer can fly but there are millions of species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are beetles I cannot completely rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.
There are well over two billion children – defined as persons under 18 years – in the world but since Santa doesn?t handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total ? around 400 million. At an average rate of 2 children per household, that’s 200 million homes. I?m making the assumption that there?s at least one good child in each household.
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 1792 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/2000th 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, for the purpose of simplifying the maths, that each of these 200 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth, we are now talking about a half mile per household with a total trip of 100 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 a minimum of 900 miles per second, A conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.
The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Again, to simplify the calculations we?ll assume that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized Lego set at two pounds weight. The sleigh is therefore carrying 400,000 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 above) could pull TEN TIMES the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine. We need 250,200 reindeer and these are not small! This increases the payload by an additional 34,000tons assuming a weight for a bull reindeer of 300 pounds.
434,000 tons travelling at 900 miles per second creates enormous 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 x 10^30 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 leaving a smell of overcooked venison in their wake. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to acceleration forces 17,500 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.