Does Santa Really Exist: A study in Physics

THE WORKLOAD "There are 2 billion children in the world, but since Santa doesn't appear to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces his work- load to 15 percent of the total, or 300 million.At an average rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 85.7 million homes. Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the Earth, assuming he travels east to west. This works out to 767.9 visits per second.So for each Christian household with good children, Santa has about 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the presents, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, into the sleigh and move on to the next house. TIME/DISTANCE "Assuming that these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the Earth, we're talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75.5 million miles SPEED"This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, or 3,000 times the speed of sound. THE PAYLOADAssuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium- size Lego set (2 lbs.), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as 'heavy.' On land, normal reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds, and even granting that flying reindeer could pull 10 times the normal amount, Santa's going to need 214,200 reindeer to pull his sleigh. This increases the payload to 353,430 tons, or four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.CONCLUSION "353,000 tons, traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance. This will heat the reindeer up like a spacecraft reentering Earth's atmosphere.� Translation: Santa Is Toast!!!