SANTA CLAUS JOKE
1. No known
species of reindeer
can fly.
There are 300,000 species of living things yet to be classified, and
most of these are insects and bacteria.
Although this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer, the chances
for it yet to be discovered are pretty slim.
2. There are 2 billion children in the world.
But since Santa only appears to handle the Christian children,
that reduces the workload to 15% of the total - 378 million.
At an average rate of 3.5 children per household, that is 91.8 millions
homes.
One presumes there's at least one "good" child in each.
-- Santa Claus Joke --
3. 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 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, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next
house.
Assuming that each one of these 91.8 million stops are evenly
distributed around the earth, we are now talking about .78 miles per
household, a total trip of 75 and a half million miles.
This means Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3000 times
the speed of sound.
For purpose of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle on earth,
the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second
- a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.
-- Santa Claus Joke --
4. The
payload on the sleigh
adds another interesting aspect.
Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized Lego Set
(2 lbs),
the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa,
who is invariably described as overweight.
On landing, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 330 pounds.
Even granting that "flying reindeer" (see point 1) could pull TEN TIMES
the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine
reindeer.
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!
-- Santa Claus Joke --
5. 353,430 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air
resistance.
This will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as space craft
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 reindeer behind them, and creating deafening Sonic Booms
in their wake.
The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousands of a
second.
Santa, meanwhile, will be subject 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!
