I was forwarded this message last Christmas in response to the traditional Why there is no Santa post that makes its rounds every year.

(That makes no sense to me what I just wrote, and yet Im posting it anyway… 😀

Im completely exhausted, please excuse me if Im making a moron out of myself.)

I received this item yesterday and I must say that I am appalled! Who could be so mean as to try to SCIENTIFICALLY prove that Santa Claus is dead and then not have the guts to sign it? Bob Packwood? Lon Mabon? Rush Limbaugh?

For those who read this and were crushed, I will try to point out the flaws and show that our dear Saint Nick is assuredly alive and well.

If you just cant wait, skip to the last few paragraphs where I give my complete theory.

All original lines of text are written in

italics style

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Is There A Santa Claus?

As a result of an overwhelming lack of requests, and with research help from that renown scientific journal SPY magazine (January, 1990) – I am pleased to present the annual scientific inquiry into Santa Claus.

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.

300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified? Sounds to me like this is the number of organisms found which have not yet been named and placed in t he family/genus/species system of classification. This leaves the door wide open to currently undiscovered organisms.

With only nine living reindeer, do you really think that Santa would let them ROAM FREELY where they can be discovered and are vulnerable to poachers? If they havent been discovered its because theyre holed up in the North Pole.

Safe, Warm by the fire, UNSEEN.

There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. BUT since Santa doesnt (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist cihldren, that reduces the workload to to 15% of the total – 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, thats 91.8 million homes. One presumes theres at least one good child in each.

For the sake of argument, Ill let these statistics go. I dont work for the Population Reference Bureau and dont have any of their statistics handy.

Dont mistake this for complaisant agreement, Im still ,skeptical.

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 seemes 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 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 t hese 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 and etc.

Okay, 31 hours appears to be an accurate figure, and with the numbers from above, that does calculate out to 822.6 visits per second. However, including travel time, he has 1/822.6 seconds per home. Thats 122 percent of the time allowed by the original author.

Given the distribution used in the blasphemous text, I calculate a total travel of 72.7 million miles. In reality, people cluster into neighborhoods and there is a division of continents, so the distance would most likely be 100 million miles or more (I worked on this for quite some time).

With the 100 million mile figure, Santa would travel at a minimum of 896 miles per second. Since he must spend some time in each household, lets double this f figure. It becomes 1792 miles per second. What can I say? The mans a speed deamon (I bet he has racing stripes on that sled).

(What Im doing here is showing that the person who wrote this article is not credible. His/her values are not even close to accurate. Also, this 1792 mi/s is important for fusion as described later.)

The way I see it, since its less than ten percent of the speed of light, Santas velocity is very feasible. By the way, Santa and his reindeer pulled sled could easily finish the Ididerod in less than that ol 11 day record.

No wonder they limit the run to dog sleds.

This means that Santas 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.

Just for the record, the Ulysses space probe is not the fastest man-made vehicle on earth. The probe is in space. Since the space shuttles come back to the ground, they should probably be considered the fastest man-made vehicles on Earth.

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.

Dont forget that not all of the children in each household were good. Many of them will be getting coal. My guess is that Santa wouldnt want to waste more than a single piece of coal on a bad child, and coal is light. That would allow for a lighter load than above or heavier gifts for the good kids with the same l load as above. The sleigh will also become lighter as the night progresses.

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 anount, 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.

Oh, sure, where does a person get information regarding the size, weight and pulling power of SANTAS reindeer when they havent even become a classified species? What is this guy/gal trying to pull?

I support the nine reindeer theory and will provide an explanation later.

353,000 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates enourmous air resistance – this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecrafts re-entering the earths 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 create deafening sonic booms in their wake.

What bunk. First of all, the necessary top speed is much greater than that and my argument above should be sufficient proof of that. Second, sure there will be some heat created, but you just cant throw around values like 14.3 quintillion joules without providing such information as frictional and drag coefficients, surface area, etc.

Also, what about the ability of reindeer to absorb and dissipate heat. I have seen a PhD thesis which explained the near extinction of these reindeer as a direct result of poaching to sell their hides as heat-sinks.

AND ANOTHER THING; reindeer bursting into flames do not cause deafening sonic booms. Youre one hell of a lot more likely to win PowerBall than you are to hear a reindeer exploding.

The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces

centrifugal – Fictional force! Fictional force!

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, hes dead now.

Okay, heres my theory to explain how Santa really works:

The reindeer are not classified because they have not been discovered by the people who assign latin names. They do exists. There are nine of them (Rudolph included).

The sled is very long and is equipped with a spring down its length which compresses upon sled acceleration to cushion Santa from the resulting forces.

The spring decompresses when acceleration halts and gradually pushes Santa back up to the front of the sled. The travel from front to back to front again allows Santa to travel past his entire inventory and thus grab the gifts for the next household.

Santa and his sled team travel at approximately 1792 miles per second and are therefore invisible to the naked eye. For nine reindeer to pull so much weight so fast, they are aided by a propulsion system based on the spewage of heavy neutrinos. Using a shield with sufficient diameter to protect the entire frontal cross section of the sled system, air is deflected into Rudolphs nose. The high speed of the entering air and the resulting pressures create a temperature increase sufficient for fusion a continuous reaction (much like the sun thus providing neutrinos for spewage). This also accounts for the red glow on the outer fringes of Rudolphs nose.

Some energy produced by the fusion reaction is stored in the legs of the other eight reindeer for use in accelerating the sled from a stop on each rooftop. Extra energy is dissipated through the reindeer as well as the loud jingle bells.

The fusion process also produces elements of the periodic table all the way up through iron (Fe). These are stored in select areas of the sled and used for the next years toys produced in the resource poor arctic region.

On Christmas Eves when Rudolph has consumed too much garlic and Pepsi, the added forward compression of an occasional nose-belch is sufficient to produce the heavier, radioactive elements which are stored and later dumped on the Pentagon as Santas gift to everyone.

UNDISPUTABLE PROOF that Santa is alive and well.

Sincerely 🙂

Jon Eggert

P.S. Santa, Ive been a good boy this year, so can I please have a copy of The Princess Bride?