Why Santa Claus does not exist.

My boss just got this in his inbox, and I thought it was funyn enough to share. Enjoy :smiley:

Some facts about Santa that you possibly haven’t considered…!

I. There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the world. However,since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist religions, this reduces the workload for Christmas night to 15% of the total, or 378 million (according to the Population Reference Bureau). At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per house hold, that comes to 108 million homes,presuming that there is at least one good child in each.

II. Santa has about 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 (which seems logical). This works out at 967.7 visits per second. That is to say that for each Christian household with a good child, Santa has around 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney,jump into the sleigh and get on to the next house. Assuming that each ofthese 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purposes of our calculations), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stops or breaks. This means Santa’s sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second — 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysees space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles per hour.

III. The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized Lego set (2 lbs), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousand tons, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 lbs. Even granting that the “flying” reindeer could pull ten times the normal amount, the job can’t be done with eight or even nine of them — Santa would need 360,000 of them. This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, by another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch).

IV. 600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance — this would heat up the reindeer 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 flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip.
Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650 miles per second in .001 seconds, would be subjected to forces of 17,500 g’s. A 250 lb Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 lbs of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo.

V. Therefore, if Santa did exist, he’s dead now!

Merry Christmas!!!

but, if santa had the ability to bilocate, he could get the whole thing done in an hour.

as for the weight of the sack, he minaturises them all, so they fit into a normal size sack, much like Sport Billies sports bag.

The reindeer are resistant to heat.

and because I stook up for Santa, I should get a really great present this year, much better than the sack of Coal and the Left Behind book he brought me last year.

make that “stuck up for santa” and I hope he brings me a spell-checker as well.

He is so real:

"Coldfire, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a sceptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Coldfire, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours, man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, Coldfire, there is a Santa Claus.

He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Coldfires. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The external light with which the SDMB fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies. You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if you did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived could tear apart. Only faith, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Coldfire, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Santa Claus? Thank God he lives and lives forever. A thousand years from now, Coldfire, nay 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!!! "
Francis P. Church (with a little help from Fenris)
So there!

Fenris

HEY! then who the hell was brought my presents for the last 27 years? huh? huh? oh and EVERYONE knows that santa can slow time down, that’s how he gets it all done. geez. oh and that’s why Santa can eat all that crap that everyone leaves him cause he moves so much. Just cause you don’t get anything don’t mean you should ruin it for everyone else!

Did we forget about Teleportation and Time Travel? What about stopping the earth from rotating so time will stop, just like in that superman movie, where rotating the earth backwards caused time to go backwards.

Obviously he doesn’t fly from house to house, that would be impossible.

Santa Claus might not be able to do the job, but Santa von Neumann might.:smiley:

Well sure, if they’re European reindeer. On the other hand, if they were African reindeer…

Time travel is impossible… at least according to my Physics teacher… but I can explain why he’s been around for so long… if those calculations are right (and I am not going to attempt to go through them… I don’t like math much which is funny since I’m in Physics…) he is moving extremely fast and when you move really fast (like almost the speed of light though I don’t think he moves that fast) time slows down… so since he makes this trip every year he’s keeping pretty young…

After seeing what Coldfire posted several years ago, I actually took an expedition and did some checking. It turns out Santa’s “sleigh” is actually a sophisticated quantum mechanical interference device. It allows Santa to, effectively, be in several thousand places all at one, doing different things. I suspect that it uses Santas from other dimensions, and that they have some sort of system whereby each of them does their work at different times of the year in their respective universes.

Obviously, of course, teleportation is an absolutely necessity. But that’s accomplished rather easily. I mean, the guy can rise up a chimney just by laying a finger aside of his nose.

LL

DUH. The reason you never see Santa Claus is because he only has 1/1000th of a second to get in and out.

::Sheesh::

broccoli!

Coldy, Santa Claus does indeed exist - you’ll just never see him unless you move.

Santa insists on adopting local customs wherever he brings presents to good little girls and boys. Unfortunately for you, Ebenezer Coldfire, he found it impossible to get any type of decent footing on a Dutch roof while wearing those stupid clogs. So he just skips your country altogether. :stuck_out_tongue:

Sheeesh, didn’t any of you get this in your email this year?

See, that is how they do it! Franchises and Volume!

All I can say is: Go Fenris! I was going to say that without belief in the unbelievable, the world would be a horrible place. I don’t think there’s any possible way I can say it better than Fenris did. Thank you! Lisa

And I’d like to say, Go Coldfire! Right on!

(Yes, I’ve seen it before. Still, thanks for sharing.)

To all the rest of you buggers, having a sense of joy at christmas hardly requires Santa Claus. But I suppose you can worship whatever religion you want.