Is There A Santa Claus? Return to Index Send this page address - CLICK HERE - to a friend ! An Engineer's Perspective Consider this argument: 1. No known species of reindeer can fly. But, there are 300,000,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified. While most of these are insects and germs, this doesn't completely rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen. 2. There are two billion children (persons under 18) in the world; but, since Santa doesn't seem to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total - 378 million according to the Population reference Bureau. At an average rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One would presume that there is at least one good child in each. 3. Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, and, assuming he travels from 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 1/100 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 71.5 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding, etc. 4. The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized Lego set (about 2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,000 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 point #1) could pull ten times the normal amount, we cannot begin to do the job with eight or nine reindeer; we need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, to 353,430 tons. 5. When 353,000 tons travel at 650 miles per second, it creates enormous air resistance. This will heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of the reindeer will absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second, each. In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer team behind them, creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 milliseconds. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250 pound Santa (which seems reasonable) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds. Conclusion: If Santa ever did deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's dead now. |