Is There A Santa Claus? 1. No known species of reindeer can fly. But there are three hundred thousand 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 two billion children (persons under eighteen) in the world. But since Santa doesn't (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15 percent of the total - 378 million, according to the 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 each. 3. Santa has thirty-one 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 1/1,000th 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 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 75.5 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every thirty-one hours, plus feeding, etc. This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, three thousand 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, fifteen miles per hour. 4. The payload on the sleigh adds another element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-size Lego set (two 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 three hundred pounds. Even granting that "flying reindeer" (see point no. 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. 5. Three hundred fifty-three thousand tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecraft reentering 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 flame 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. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) 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 The Less Factual Rebuttal... Come on, ya gotta believe! I mean, if you can handle flying furry animals, then it's only a small step to the rest. For example: 1. As admitted, it is possible that a flying reindeer can be found. I would agree that it would be quite an unusual find, but they might exist. 2. You've relied on cascading assumptions. For example, you have assumed a uniform distribution of children across homes. Toronto/Yorkville, or Toronto/Cabbagetown, or other yuppie neighborhoods, have probably less than the average (and don't forget the DINK and SINK homes - Double Income No Kids, Single Income No Kids), while the families with 748 starving children that they keep showing on Vision TV while trying to pick my pocket would skew that 15 percent of homes down a few percent. 3. You've also assumed that each home that has kids would have at least one good kid. What if antiselection applies, and homes with good kids tend to have more than their share of good kids, and other homes have nothing except terrorists in diapers? Let's drop that number of homes down a few more percent. 4. Santa would have to Fed-Ex a number of packages ahead of time, since he would not be able to fly into air force bases, or into tower-controlled areas near airports. He'd get shot at over certain sections of the Middle East, and the no-fly zones in Iraq, so he'd probably use DHL there. Subtract some more homes. 5. I just barely passed physics and only read Stephen Hawking's book once, but I recall that there is some Einsteinian theory that says time does strange things as you move faster. In fact, when you go faster than the speed of light time runs backward, if you do a straight-line projection, connect the dots, and just ignore any singularity you might find right at the speed of light. And don't say you can't go faster than the speed of light because I've seen it done on TV. Jean-Luc doesn't have reindeer but he does have matter-antimatter warp engines and a holodeck and that's good enough for me. So Santa could go faster than light, visit all the good children not uniformly distributed by either concentration in each home or by number of children per household, and get home before he left so he can digest all those stale cookies and warm milk. Yech. 6. Aha, you say, Jean-Luc has matter-antimatter warp engines, Santa only has reindeer, so where does he get the power to move that fast? You calculated the answer! The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy. Per second. Each. This is an ample supply of energy for the maneuvering, acceleration, etc., that would be required of the loaded sleigh. The reindeer don't evaporate or incinerate because of this energy, they accelerate. What do you think they have antlers for, fighting over females? Think of antlers as furry solar array panels. 7. If that's not enough, watch the news on the twenty-fourth at eleven o'clock. NORADM (which may be one of the few government agencies with more than three initials in its name, and therefore it must be more trustworthy than the rest) tracks Santa every year, and I've seen the radar shots of him approaching my house from the direction of the North Pole. They haven't bomarck'd him yet, so they must believe too, right?