Does Santa exist ?
Please find below a scientific investigation into Santa Claus.
1) No known species of reindeer can fly. BUT there are3 00,000 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 pull10 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 travelling at 650 miles/second creates enormous air resistance. This will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as a spacecraft 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, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporised 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.