Once and for all, people, of COURSE Santa exists!
Do you, like me, keep getting mean spirited pseudoscientific explanations of how "Santa cannot exist" for one reason or another? I got another one of those today. How like all those pointy headed scientists to use complicated equations to explain away something we all know to be true! Clearly, what's needed here is a lot less "theory" and a lot more of the "On The Ground" consulting and project saving workarounds that we are famous for in the Notes world.
I've been seeing these for years, and thought I'd post some of my favorite rebuttals. If you have more, please feel free to add yours.
Frankly, my favorite of all the rebuttals is quite simple. Santa simply realizes all of his possible quantum states at once. Duh?
For those who have lived in a cave, and haven't seen this before, here is the "Supposedly Scientific" attempt to explain away the TRUTH. As responses, I'll post some rebuttals.
There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in
the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of the
Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, or Buddhist (except maybe Japan) 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 that there is at least one good child in
each.
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 each Christian household
with a good child, Santa has around 1/1000th of a second to park the
sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings,
distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks
have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh
and get to the next house.
Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is 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 Santa's sleigh is
moving at 650 miles per second - 3,000 times the speed of sound. For
purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses
space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second, and a
conventional reindeer can 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 thousand tons, not counting
Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more
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 weight of the sleigh, another 54,000 tons,
or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship,
not the monarch). 600,000 tons traveling at the 650 miles per second
creates enormous air resistance-this would heat up the reindeer in
the same fashion as a spacecraft reentering 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
almost 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 right
about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip.
Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of
accelerating from a dead stop to 650 m.p.s in .001 seconds, would be
subjected to acceleration 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, crushing his bones and organs
and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo.
Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.
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