A Scientific Inquiry Into Santa Claus

Three weeks from tonight is Christmas Eve, the magical time when visions of sugarplums dance in the heads of children and parents valiantly struggle to understand why "some assembly required" means that you need dual PhDs in Mechanical Engineering (to do the assembly) and Linguistics (to understand the assembly instructions, which are invariably written in Old Church Slavonic by the same folks who write the mind-numbing stuff you have to agree to when you load new software).

Ah, Christmas!

Of course, like so many other things, Christmas isn't what it used to be. Since nobody can be offended, we can't have things like manger scenes in public places, and people mouth platitudes like "happy holidays!" instead of "Merry Christmas!" We come up with silly compromises like "Sparkle Season" so that nobody will be able to bitch and complain that their beliefs are being dissed. Of course, if you worship the Great God Sparkle, you'll run crying to the ACLU anyhow, but experience shows that by trying to please everyone, we please no one.

So ...

All that being said, let's dig into Bilbo's Big Bag O' Odd Stuff and cast a scientifically critical eye at that last bastion of secular Christmas cheer, good old Santa Claus ...

1) No known species of reindeer can fly, but there are 300,000 species of 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 actually ever seen).

2) There are an estimated 2 billion children (defined as persons under 18) in the world. However, since Santa doesn't appear to handle Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, or Buddhist children, the potential workload comes down to about 15% of the original total - 378 million according to the Population Reference Bureau. At an average census rate of 3.5 children per household, that's only 91.8 million homes. We shall proceed on the basis of the assumption that there is at least one good child in each (and we will also, for the moment, ignore the sinister role of the CIA and the National Security Agency in monitoring the goodness of children).

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. Doing the math, we see 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, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up 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 we know to be false but accept for the purpose of these calculations), we are talking about .78 miles per 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 eating, etc. This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3000 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. The fastest conventional reindeer observed to date has been clocked at a glacial 15 miles per hour.

4) The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-size set of Lego building blocks (weighing about two pounds), the sleigh carries an estimated 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, a single conventional reindeer can generally pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that flying reindeer exist (see point 1), can fly very quickly (see point 2), and can pull ten times the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine, reindeer. We would need a minimum of 214,200 reindeer, not counting operational spares. This increases the payload - not counting the weight of the sleigh - to 353,430 tons. By comparison, this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth 2.

5) 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance which would heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy. Per second. Each. In short, they would burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within .00426 seconds. Santa, meanwhile, would be subjected to forces 17,500 times greater than normal gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems 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.

And Julian Assange will soon publish the documentary proof.

Have a good day. Tomorrow is Cartoon Saturday ... I think we'll all need it.

More thoughts then.

Bilbo