The original source of this classic Christmas-time piece, which has been making the rounds on the Internet for decades, is attributed to: [email protected] (The Human Neutrino aka Linda Harden)
Original Title: IS THERE A SANTA CLAUS?
Alternately ascribed to the now defunct SPY magazine, January 1990.
- No known species of reindeer can fly. BUT there are 300,000 species of living organisism 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 15% of the total – or 378 million according to the Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that is 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 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, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming that each one of these 91.8 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but for the purpose of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per 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. This means Santa’s sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3000 times the speed of sound. For the purpose of comparison the man-made Ulysses space probe, the fastest vehicle ever made on earth, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second while 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 lbs), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa — who is invariably described as overweight. On landing, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 330 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 reindeer. 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 4.25 times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth ocean liner!
- 353,430 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance. This will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as space craft 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 almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and creating deafening Sonic Booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subject 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
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