Date:         Wed, 30 Nov 94 21:30:29 CST
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@vanagon.com>
From:         Joel Walker <JWALKER@ua1vm.ua.edu>
Subject:      The Existance of Santa Claus <Kris Kringle, Father Christmas, etc.>


I wish I could say I wrote this, but I didn^t. Not sure where
it's from. Happy holidays to all.

           IS THERE A SANTA?

1.  No known species of reindeer can fly. But there ARE 300,000 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 seen.

2.  There are 2 billion children (under 18) in the world. But since Santa
doesn't appear to handle Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and Jewish children,
that reduces the workload to 15% of the total- 378 million or so. At an
average rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes.
One presumes there's at least one good child in each home.

3.  Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to time zones and
the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west. This works
out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian
household with good children, Santa has 1/1000 th of a second to park, hop
out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings,  distribute
the remaining gifts under the tree, eat the snacks, get back up the
chimney,get back in the sleigh, and move on to the next house. Assuming
that each of these 91.8 million homes are distributed evenly (which we
know to be false but for the sake of these calculations we will accept)
we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75-1/2
million miles, not counting bathroom stops.
 This means that Santa's sleigh is travelling at 650 miles per
second, 3000 times the speed of sound. For comparison, the fastest man
made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe moves at a poky 27.4 MPS; the
average reindeer runs at 15 MPH.

4.  The sleighs payload adds another interesting element. Assuming that
each child gets nothing more than a medium sized Lego set (2 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 granting that "flying reindeer" (see point one)
could pull TEN TIMES the usual amount, we can not do the job with 8 or
even 9. we need 214,000 reindeer. This increases the weight, not even
counting the sleigh, to 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison, this is 4
times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth 2.

5.  353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air
resistance. This will heat the reindeer in the same manner 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
next pair of reindeer, and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake.
The entire team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousands of a second.
Santa,meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times
the force of gravity. A 300 pound Santa would be pinned to the back of
his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.

6. Conclusion: There was a Santa, but he's dead now.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

blantantly stolen from the British Car List. :)

joel
jwalker@ua1vm.ua.edu