From Our "Bah-Humbug!" Files
A Scientist's View of Santa Claus

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 that only Santa has ever seen.

2) There are two billion children in the world. But since Santa doesn't (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, and Buddhist children. This reduces the workload down to 15 percent of the total, or 378 million according to the national population reference bureau. Assuming the consensus average rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes that there's at least one good child in each.

3) 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 approximately 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 what ever 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 know talking about .78 miles per household, a trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us have to do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding the reindeer. This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. For the purposes of comparison, the fastest manmade vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a pokey 27.4 miles per second- a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.

4) The payload on 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 321,000 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as being overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that "flying reindeer" could pull TEN TIMES the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine. We need 214,000 reindeer. This increases the payload—not even counting the weight of the sleigh—to 353,430 tons.

5) 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance- this will heat up the reindeer up in the same fashion as space crafts reentering 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 each of 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) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 43,155,015 pounds of force.

In conclusion, if Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's been squashed and vaporized by now.