From: Wally Anglesea 
To: Skeptix Mail List 
Subject: On the improbability of Santa Clause
Date: Wednesday, December 16, 1998 2:04 AM

People,

It's silly season I know, and I just received this.  I have some questions
at the end of it:
There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the
world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish
or Buddhist except maybe in Japan) religions, this reduces the workload for
Christmas night 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 comes to 108 million homes, presuming there is at least
one good child in each. Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with,
thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming
east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 967.7 visits per
second. This is to say that for each Christian household with a good child,
Santa has around 1/1000 th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump
down the chimney, fill the stocking, distribute the remaining presents under
the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the
chimney, jump into the sleigh and get onto the next house.
Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around
the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the
purposes of our calculations), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per
household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stops
or breaks. This means Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per
second--3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the
fastest man made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4
miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles per
hour.
 The payload of 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 over 500 thousand tons, not counting Santa
himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds.
Even granting that the "flying" Reindeer can pull 10 times the normal
amount, the job can't be done with eight or even nine of them---Santa would
need 360,000 of them. This increases the payload, not counting the weight of
the sleigh, another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the
Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch).
A mass of nearly 600,000 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates
enormous air resistance - this would heat up the reindeer in the same
fashion as a spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of
reindeer would adsorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each.
 In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the
reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake.
The entire reindeer team would be vaporised within 4.26 thousandths of a
second, or right about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip.
Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from
a dead stop to 650 m.p.s. in .001 seconds, would be subjected to
acceleration forces of 17,000 g's. A 250 pound Santa (which seems
ludicrously slim considering all the high calorie snacks he must have
consumed over the years) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by
4,315,015 pounds of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and
reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo.
 Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.

Now my questions are:

If the reindeer are indeed subject to 14.3 quintillion joules of energy,
would they not instantaneously undergo atomic fusion?  How big an explosion
would an average reindeer make?

Or is it possible that Santa does not need to travel that fast, because as a
result of time dilation, his relative time passes more slowly than us
mortals?




Merry Christmas
Did you hear about the dyslexic devil worshipper?
Made a pact with Santa.....

Cheers,
Wally



Read about Australia's most dangerous Doomsday Cult:

http://www.ozemail.com.au/~wanglese/pebble.htm