Santa Claus is Dead...

A Scientific Inquiry into Santa Claus

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 ever seen.

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

3) Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with. This is due to the 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/second. This is to
say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has .001
second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, get 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 earth (which, of course,
we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept),
we are now talking about .78 miles/household, a total trip of 75.5 million
miles; not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every
31 hours, plus feeding & etc. So Santa's sleigh must be moving at 650 miles/second,
3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest
man-made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4
miles/second. A conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles/hour.

4) The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming
that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (2 lb.),
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 lb. Even granting that "flying reindeer" (see #1) could
pull 10 TIMES the normal amount, we cannot do the job with 8, or even 9
reindeer. We need 214,200. This increases the payload - not counting the
weight of the sleigh - to 353,430 tons. This is four times the weight of
the ocean-liner Queen Elizabeth.

5) 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles/second creates enormous air resistance.
This will heat up the reindeer up in the same fashion as a spacecraft reentering
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 reindeer behind them, and create deafening
sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within
.00426 of a second. Meanwhile, Santa will be subjected to centrifugal forces
17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250-lb Santa (seems ludicrously
slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 lb. of force.

In Conclusion:
If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's dead now.