With Christmas around the corner, and all of the little children wishing and writing to Santa about the video game they want, or the pony they'll wish they never wished for in a few years, I decided that it was time for me to roll out with The Unfunny Truth About Santa Claus thread. NOTE: If you believe in Santa, I would stop reading here. It has to be done: No known species of reindeer can fly However, there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and bugs, it does not rule out the theory of flying reindeer. There are an estimated 2 billion children in the world. But since santa doesn't apparently handle muslim, hindu, jewish and buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total, a mere 378 million. At an average rate of 3.5 children per family, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there's at least one good child in each house. 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 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 whatever food is left for him, get back up the chimney, get into the sleigh, and move to the next house. Assuming that these 91,800,000 stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which we know is not true), we are now talking about .76 miles per household, a total trip of 75,500,000 miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours. This means that Santa's sled is moving at 650 miles per second, 3000 times faster than 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. A conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour. The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized Lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can carry, at most, 300 pounds. Even granting the ability of 'flying reindeer' to pull perhaps ten times the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight or even nine. We need more. Actually, we need 214,191 more reindeer, or a total of 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, to 353,420 tons. Which is 4 times the load of the liner the Queen Elizabeth. 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance, which will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering the Earth's atmosphere. The lead reindeer will be subjected to 14,300,000,000,000,000,000 joules of energy. Per second. Each. In shot, they will almost instantaneously burst into flames, exposing the reindeer behind them, who will repeat the process, and they will also 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 acceleration 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 4,315,015 pounds of force. In conclusion, if Santa ever did deliver presents on Christmas, he's dead now.
thirded. but i can prove he doesn't exist..... he can cure or fix anything, so if that's true, WHERE'S THE BEEF???
Ditto. You need to be logical te0, If he has flying deer then he has magic. Magic to stop time? so let's say he breaks the world into sections and gives the gifts out in a longer time. So it could take him ten years to give the gifts out, then he rewinds his own personal time so he's younger. That's how gifts go out and he stays young. HA! Santa, The tooth fairy, presidents who tell the truth, and zombies are real!
He delivers gifts via teh interweb... late at night you can see them jumping out of your disc drive and placing themselves under the tree... so yeah magic...
heres a response I got from a friend at work to this... Just because we don’t understand something, doesn’t mean it isn’t so. Wikipedia believes in Santa Claus. If they didn’t why would they have a whole page dedicated to Santa Claus? Just watch Miracle on 34th Street and tell me you don’t believe. The North American Aerospace Defense Command, Norad, has the evidence that proves Santa gets around. Each year they track Santa’s progress around the world. Norad says it uses a spy satellite in space to pick up the glow from Rudolph’s nose. It then follows the sleigh using radar along the northern border of North America before two Canadian fighter jets are sent up to act as an escort (and make sure he is not an imposter). NOrad also knows how he gets so much done in such a short time.Official Santa Picture from US Air Force A spokesman for Norad said: “The fact that Santa Claus is more than 15 centuries old and does not appear to age is our biggest clue that he does not work within time as we know it.†Instead he “somehow functions on a different space and time continuumâ€. So Christmas Eve - which seems impossibly brief to us - could actually feel to him like days, weeks or months. If you don’t believe, just call NORAD at 1-877- Hi-NORAD and they will tell you what’s what. Millions of people acting as Santa’s helpers buy and give gifts to people they just plain don’t know. Now why would they do that if they didn’t think Santa was real, but needs a little help now and then. Just look at the US Marines, from 1947 - 2003 the U.S. Marines distributed 313 million toys to 151 million needy children through it’s Toys for Tots Foundation. Every year we put out the cookies and milk for Santa, and every year those cookies get eaten and that milk gets drunk. It just feels a lot better to believe in the spirit of giving that Santa represents. Without Santa our lives just would not be the same. Santa's story may be fantastic but I realized it does serve a valuable purpose. Of course the ageless, "Yes, VIrginia,There Is A Santa Caus," explains it best. The truth of that editorial is staggering and timeless. Santa does encourage children to believe in what they can't see but is still very real none the less. As this eloquent piece from the New York Sun suggests, it is the thing which we can't see which is the most valuable. So if you the parent are Santa - not the legendary man from the North Pole - then what could be better for a child to believe in than the pure love between parent - child. All the thought, concern and sacrifice that you as parents put into the Santa production is evidence that the essence of Santa is real. In the celebration of Santa we are not really promoting fantasy at all. We are showing what is most real - pure unconditional love. The Christmas gifts themselves are immaterial. The common adage - It is the thought that counts - is certainly true.I believe that children gain their best sense of being loved through the ordinary but constant and reassuring routines of daily family life. Santa, however, is the ultimate festive manifestation of this surreal ideal! How appropriate that it is an end of year celebration! Santa then becomes a physical manifestation of an eternal emotion. Children learn to have hope, experience exquisite joy, and believe in what seems improbable and impossible from their belief in Santa Claus.They learn to believe in ideals that can not be destroyed neither by the physical circumstances of this world or by the passage of time. These hopes and beliefs are as necessary to the spirit as nutrition is to the body. I still believe. Nothing you can say will ever change my mind.