There is no known species of reindeer that can fly. BUT there are around 300'000 different life forms that yet have to be classified, and although most of them are bacteria and insects, this doesn't exclude flying reindeer, that have since now only been seen by Santa Claus.

There are around 2 Billion children (people under 18 years of age) worldwide. BUT because Santa doesn't bring presents to Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and Jewish children, the number is reduced to about 15% - 378 million children (according to statistics). With an average of 3.5 children per household, there are about 91,8 million houses. We'll assume that in each house there is at least one child who has been good the whole year.

Santa Claus has a Christmas day of 31 hours, due to the different time zones if he travels from the east to the west. That means 822.6 visits every second. In that case, Santa has a millisecond (one thousandth of a second) for each good child. He also needs time to park the sleigh, jump out, squeeze himself through the chimney, fill the stockings, place the rest of the presents under the tree, eat the remains of the Christmas meal, shove himself back up the chimney and fly to the next house.

Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are distributed evenly above the surface of the earth (which we all know isn't true, but we'll accept it for the sake of the calculation), we get a distance of 1.3 kilometers between each house, a total distance of 120.8 million kilometers, not considering the stops for eating and doing what everyone of us has to do at least once every 31 hours. This means that Santa's sleigh has to fly at a speed of 1040 km per second, 3000 times the speed of sound.

As a comparison: The fastest man-made vehichle, the Ulysses Space Probe, travels at a laughable speed of 43,8 km per second. An average reindeer travels at 24 km per HOUR.

The load on the sleigh leads to another interesting effect. Assuming each child gets no more than an ordinary Lego set (about 1 kg), the sleigh will have a mass of 378'000 tons, not counting Santa himself, who we all agree is definitely overweight. The average reindeer can't pull more than 175 kg. Even if we assume that the flying reindeer (see 1st paragraph) can pull 10 times as much as the average reindeer, 8 or 9 deer aren't enough. 216'000 reindeer would be more appropriate. This increases the weight to 410'400 tons (not counting the weight of the sleigh itself). 410'400 tons at a speed of 1040 km/s creates a monstrous air resistance. That way, the reindeer will heat up, just like a space shuttle that enters the earth's atmosphere. The pair of deer in the front has to absorb 16.6 TRILLION JOULES of Energy. Every second. Each one. In other words, they will go up in flames almost instantly. The next pair of reindeer is exposed to the same air resistance, and a deafening bang is heard. The whole team of reindeer is vaporised in 5/1000 of a second.

Meanwhile, Santa is exposed to a force 17'500 times as much as gravitational force. A man weighing 120 kg (which is significantly less than what is usually described) would be nailed to the back of the sleigh. With a force of 20.6 million Newtons.

We come to the conclusion: If Santa Claus once brought the presents, he would be very dead by now.

-A

man you must have soo much free time to do all those calculations... /envy

Hehe, to be honest I didn't write it myself. Found it somewhere in German and had to translate it

-A

Thanks man! I freaking love that. I was thinking about this the other day and meant to look for it. You saved me some googling time.

Let me guess, you wanted to torture your nephews with that .

I wonder how a 4-year-old would react to that stuff..

-A

Sounds like one of those things that you hear from a chain email.

Hey! Some of our younger members may still believe in Santa, you insensitive clod!

Let's keep LQ appropriate for all ages, ok?

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I agree completely!

This is how I explained Santa to my kids:

Santa is able to do what he does because he's magic. Santa's magic comes from the love all parents have for their children. As long as there are parents who love their children, there will ALWAYS be a Santa Claus.

Ok that's a logical explanation

-A

Well if I had kids, I'd tell them:

Santa Clause exists as long as I have a job.



Thank goodness, I don't have kids....

I can now reveal that Santa Claus does indeed exist
and assists the US Military at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_51
http://www.terraserver.com/special/area51/area51.asp
where do you think they get the technology from
the UFO conspiracy is just a red herring
from stopping people from guessing the truth
all that Mach 3+ technology and stealth stuff
comes from none other than Santa himself
who has been doing it for years

The truth is out there
floppy

I find that nobody especially a child has been good an entire week.

But assuming there was one child per house that was good that long a time:
Santa and his reindeer wouldn't burn up if he had the means to manipulate space and time.

My question is:
Would such a loving fat happy dude punish children with coal for being bad?

Because coal is lighter than lego-sets?

-A