Santa Claus?
Many parents today lie to their children and tell them that there is a man named Santa Claus who will bring them gifts on Christ's Mass if they are "good." (Sounds like a religion if you ask me). Yet, millions of people preach this blatant dribble to make their children behave because they are too lazy to train up their kids correctly.Now, let's look at this for just a minute. For just a milli-second, let's consider that there was a Satan (I mean Santa) Claus. Could he really do what your parents told you that he could? Let's see:
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 household, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming there is at least one good child in each home.
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 to 967.7 visits per second. This is to say that for every "Christian" household with a good child in it, Santa has around 1/1000 of a second to park the sleigh, unload the parcels, scurry down the chimney, place the gifts, stuff the stockings, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, scramble back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh and race to the next house. Assuming that each of these 108 million stops are evenly distributed around the Earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purpose 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 that Santa's sleigh is moving 650 miles per second, or 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man made vehicle, the "Ulysses" space probe, moves a poky 27.4 miles per second: a conventional reindeer can only run (at best) 15 miles per hour.
The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized "Lego" set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying over 500 than 300 pounds. 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 sleigh, another 54,000 ton, or roughly seven times the weight of the "Queen Elizabeth" (the ship, not the monarch!)
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 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 about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip. Not that it matters, though...
Santa, as a result of accelerating for a dead stop to 650 miles per second in .001 seconds would be subjected to centrifugal forces of 17,500 g's. A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4, 315,015 pounds of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs, reducing him to a quivering blob of red goo!
All I can say is that if Santa really did exist, he's definitely dead now!