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Why Santa Can't Exist

There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18)
in the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of
Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist (except maybe in 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 on 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 purposes 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 650 miles per second creates
enormous air resistance-this would heat up the reindeer in the
same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering 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, instantly
crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering
blob of pink goo. Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.