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A "scientific" treatise on Ol' Saint Nick

A "scientific" treatise on Ol' Saint Nick

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 and 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 each3) 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
   (which seems logical). 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,
   fill the stockings, distribute the remaining gifts 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, of course, we
   know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept),
   we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75 1/2
   million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least
   once every 31 hours, plus feeding, etcThis means that 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 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

3. The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming
   that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized lego set (2 pounds),
   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 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. 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 II

4. 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air
   resistance. This will heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as
   spacecraft 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 flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer
   behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire
   reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second.
   

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