Sorry to be such a Scrooge but someone had to say it! Does Santa Claus really exist?
- No known species of a reindeer can fly. BUT there are 300 000 species of living organisms, which have yet to be classified. And although these are mostly insects and bacteria, this may not exclude flying reindeer, which were only seen by Santa so far.
- There are around 2 billion children (people under 18) in this world. BUT Santa seems not to deliver to Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhists. This reduces his work to approximately 15% of the total - 378 million children (according to census). An average of 3.5 children per household yields 91.8 million houses. We assume that in every house lives at least one good child.
- If Santa Claus is travelling from East to West, he has a 31-hour-Christmas Day, allowed by the several time zones (which seems to be logical). Therefore you have 822.6 visits per second. Consequently, for every Christian household with good children Santa has 1/1 000 seconds for his work: park, jump out of his sleigh, come down the chimney, fill the socks, distribute the remaining presents under the Christmas Tree, exterminate the leftover of the Christmas meal, climb up the chimney again and fly to the next house. Assume that each of these 91.8 million stops around the world are equal (which of course, we know, is wrong, but for fundamental calculation we will accept this), so we get a 1.3 Km distance between households, an overall distance of 120.8 million Km, not including the things which everyone of us has to do at least once in 31 hours, plus getting a meal, etc. This means, that Santa's sleigh flies at 1 040 Km per second, 3 000 times the speed of sound. For comparison: the fastest man made vehicle in the world, the Ulysses Space Probe, travels with a ridiculous speed of 43.8 Km per second. An ordinary reindeer travels at speeds of up to 24 Km per HOUR.
- The freight of the sleigh leads to another interesting effect. Assume that every child gets no more than a medium-sized Lego-Set (approximately 1 Kg), then the sleigh has a weight of 378 000 tons, not including Santa, who to everyone's knowledge is an overweight man. An ordinary reindeer cannot carry more than 175 Kg. Even if we assume, that a "flying reindeer" (according to (1)) can carry the ten-fold weight, not eight or even nine reindeer are be used for the sleigh. 216 000 reindeer are used. This raises the weight - not included the sleigh itself - to 410 400 tons. Again, to compare, this is more than the fourfold weight of [the ship] Queen Elisabeth.
- 410 400 tons travelling at a speed of 1 040 Km/s produces a huge air resistance - thus the reindeer will burn up, like a space craft entering the earth's atmosphere. The foremost pair of reindeer must then absorb 16.6 TRILLION Joules of energy. Every second. Otherwise they will go up in flames practically instantaneously, the next pair of reindeer will be exposed to the air opposition, and a deafening bang will be produced. The whole team of reindeer will be vaporised within 5 thousandths of a second. In the meantime Santa will be exposed to an acceleration 17 500 times that of the earth's gravity. A 120 Kg Santa Claus (which is ridiculously light after the description) would be nailed to the end of his sleigh - with a force of 20.6 million Newton.
Nolan Out!
