Is There a Santa Claus?

As a result of an overwhelming lack of requests, and with research help from that renown scientific journal SPY magazine (January 1990), I am pleased to present the annual scientific inquiry into Santa Claus.

(1) No known species of reindeer can fly. HOWEVER, there are 300,000 species of organisms yet to be classified, and most of these are insects and germs, this does not 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 (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and Jewish children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total - 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 that there is at least one good child in each.

(3) Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to 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, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, 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 globe (which we of course know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will assume to be correct), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75 and a half million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding, etc.

This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, three thousand times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle ever produced, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.

(4) The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized Lego set (two pounds), 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 pounds. Even granted that "flying reindeer" (see point #1) can pull TEN TIMES the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine. 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 four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.

(5) 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance - this will heat the reindeer in the same fashion as 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 flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and creating a deafening sonic boom in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected 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.