The Truth About Santa Read online

  The Truth About Santa

  The Truth About Santa

  WORMHOLES, ROBOTS,

  AND WHAT REALLY HAPPENS ON CHRISTMAS EVE

  Gregory Mone

  To Nika

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  ORIGINS

  1. Why Santa Can’t Use FedEx

  2. Where Santa Got All His Wonderful Tools

  3. The Aliens Who Love Christmas

  4. From Shipbuilder to Toy Maker

  5. Why Santa Needs Lieutenants

  HEALTH

  6. Santa’s Shrinking Waistline

  7. How Santa Handles His Booze

  8. Robotic Surgeons in Silly Outfits

  9. The Immortality Paradox

  10. Why Santa Hibernates

  SANTA INC.

  11. The Strategic Elvis Convention

  12. Memory-Erasing Milk

  13. The North Pole Is Melting

  14. Living Green in Greenland

  15. Why All Elves Are Clones

  SURVEILLANCE

  16. Kringle’s Eyes in the Skies

  17. Naughty or Nice

  18. Guilt-Ridden Visions of Sugarplums

  19. Why Santa Ditched Coal

  TRANSPORTATION

  20. The Chimney as Wormhole Mouth

  21. How to Kill a Santa

  22. Time Travel and Delivery Tracking

  23. Santa (Almost) Never Sleeps

  24. A Note About Whether or Not Reindeer Can Really Fly

  25. Reindeer and Public Relations

  26. Turn Up the Warp Drive, Rudolph!

  INFILTRATION

  27. Baby, It’s Cold in Interdimensional Space

  28. The Instantly Invisible Man

  29. Quiet, the Ornaments Are Listening

  DELIVERY

  30. How Santa Knows What You Want

  31. What Really Happened at Tunguska

  32. Toys That Build Themselves

  33. Teleporting Kittens

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  The Truth About Santa

  Introduction

  Belief in Santa claus is fading. In some cities, children as young as sixteen are now rumored to be stomping home from school in the days leading up to Christmas and crying before their parents, “Why did you lie to me? Why did you tell me he was real?”

  These confused young people shouldn’t be blamed for their newfound doubts. On some level, Santa’s annual rounds, and so many of the other details surrounding his operation, do seem impossible. Think about it. He knows if we’ve been bad or good. All of us. He also knows what we all want for Christmas, when we’re sleeping, and when we’re awake. To most people, that probably doesn’t just sound implausible; it undoubtedly seems a little creepy, too.

  The whole immortality issue usually spurs a few questions, too, especially since the legends suggest that Santa lives on a diet of milk and cookies. Normally, this sort of eating behavior leads to obesity, heart disease, and, in all likelihood, an early death. According to what we know about health and nutrition, Santa wouldn’t make it to sixty, let alone six hundred.

  Then there’s his travel routine. Skeptics doubt that he’s really able to traverse the entire globe in just a few hours via a reindeer-drawn sleigh. They scoff at the notion that reindeer can fly in the first place. They wonder how it is that Santa can slip down the slimmest chimneys despite his reportedly prodigious waistline. They laugh at the notion that he can do so while carrying a sack over his shoulder that somehow contains enough toys for most of the kids on the planet. And how is it that he never makes mistakes? His sleigh never slips off one of those slanted, snow-covered rooftops and crushes some family’s SUV in the driveway below. He never trips a security alarm or gets caught on video. You never see a camera-phone-captured clip of him on YouTube.

  There are many arguments that attempt to refute the existence of Santa Claus. But they are all wrong. (Except for the reindeer one.) They are, in a word, uneducated. The problem with kids today, and the reason they are so quick to give up believing, is that they lack the basic knowledge of the universe required for a true understanding of Santa. As anyone with a decent grasp of physics, biology, and materials science understands, Santa’s advertised abilities are perfectly plausible.

  Yes, Santa is real, and this book will reveal, for the first time, how he completes his seemingly impossible annual mission. The simple answer? Technology. Santa has at his disposal some of the most advanced equipment, devices, materials, and means of transportation in this or any other universe.

  The book will first address the origins of St. Nick and his operation, including Santa’s true identity, whether or not he really completes all the deliveries himself, and why it wouldn’t make sense for him to go the corporate route and outsource the whole business. Then we’ll explore some questions about his health and explain how on-demand organ printers, intelligent robotic surgeons, and a hibernation-based antiaging program have helped him thrive despite his terrible diet.

  We’ll delve into Santa’s ties to big business and the true nature of the North Pole, including its automated elf-cloning system and electricity-generating underwater turbines. The workshop has a massive server farm, too, which you’d have to expect given the amount of surveillance data Santa collects each year. He knows if you’ve been bad or good because he uses flying robotic spies.

  And how does he move around the world so quickly? Think warp drive and wormholes. This book will detail the function of both, and also explain how Santa’s suit doubles as an invisibility cloak and why all the gifts he deposits are either self-assembled under the tree or, in rare cases, teleported.

  Of course, we’ll also discuss some of the relevant psychological and sociological issues at the North Pole. For example, how the positively transcendent beauty of Mrs. Claus led Santa to reject the idea of cloning himself and why robots don’t change diapers. If you’re looking for the recipe for Mrs. Claus’s eggnog, though, you will be disappointed. How she achieves such a perfect balance of cream, egg, and brandy we will never know.

  PART I

  Origins

  1

  Why Santa Can’t Use FedEx

  OUTSOURCING, CARBON-EMISSION-CANCELING SAPLINGS, AND OTHER COSTLY COMPLEXITIES OF DOING CHRISTMAS THE CORPORATE WAY

  The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke used to say that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. This is particularly relevant in the case of Santa Claus. For years people have attributed the successful completion of his annual rounds to magical tricks. Yet every one of Santa’s amazing abilities comes from real technology. And he needs these fabulous gadgets, vehicles, and devices because it would be too hard for one man, or even millions of people, to accomplish his annual mission without them. It would be ridiculously expensive, too. How costly? A. T. Kearney consultant Mike Moriarty and his team recently looked at what it would take if Santa couldn’t slow time or fly behind a set of reindeer but was instead powered by a bottomless bank account.

  First, they decided that Santa would probably rely on the Internet. Using a mail room to collect wish lists, or even staffing a call center to speak with kids directly, would be too slow, costly, and complex. Moriarty suggested that instead of writing letters, kids would register for gifts on sites like Facebook, Club Penguin, or MySpace. There would be limitations, of course. Santa couldn’t allow them to request a Ferrari or a window seat on the first space tourism plane. Parents and guardians would need to be involved. They would have to be able to check to make sure that little Robby wasn’t asking for the Mature-rated game they already said he couldn’t have. They could assist with the naughty-or-nice question, too, and
help Santa determine whether a given child actually deserves a gift. Kids can’t be trusted to assess their own behavior.

  Moriarty concluded that Santa would probably want to steer a percentage of kids to virtual presents, such as gift cards, that could be fulfilled online. This way, he would have fewer presents to deliver and, as a result, lower costs and environmental impact.

  What about those friendly little elves? Keeping them on the payroll all year wouldn’t really make sense, from a business standpoint. No, Santa would outsource his toy manufacturing operations. This would save him serious money, but it would add another level of complexity. Santa has a reputation to uphold, a brand to manage, so he would have to ensure that all of these factories adhered to the best standards possible, in terms of working conditions, wages, quality of the goods. If you think Mattel looked bad after that lead paint was found in their toys, imagine what kind of public relations damage this would have done to Santa Claus. People would be cementing their chimneys shut.

  The manufacturing facilities would have to be green. Given the risk that climate change poses to the North Pole—a topic to be discussed at length in chapter 13—Santa would want guarantees that every factory be as environmentally friendly as possible. He’d insist that they take advantage of recycled materials, reusable building materials, and alternative energy whenever possible.

  Still, it’s really the next step, moving all those toys from factories to homes, that would do the bulk of the damage to the atmosphere. Moriarty and his team concluded that Santa would have to avoid air freight whenever possible, though it’s the fastest option, and move the goods via container ships, rail lines, and, eventually, old-fashioned delivery trucks. To offset all the fuel burned along the way, he suggested planting Christmas tree saplings along the tree line in Russia and Canada.

  The budget for this entire endeavor would be absurd, especially if you add in delivery: not just getting these gifts to kids’ doorsteps, but slipping them under the tree in the middle of the night. Completing this final step in the U.S. alone would call for millions of highly trained employees, probably former military operatives, breaking and entering repeatedly without being seen or heard. The domestic tally for an operation of this scale would cost in the range of $30 billion per year.

  “There is good reason why Santa employs cost-free and happy elves in workshops that do not actually exist in physical reality and delivers gifts using relatively greenhouse-gas-neutral reindeer power,” Moriarty concluded. “In addition to being nice, it saves Santa a bundle.”

  2

  Where Santa Got All His

  Wonderful Tools

  COSMIC STRINGS, WARPED SPACE-TIMES, ROTATING UNIVERSES, AND THE LIMITS OF TIME MACHINES

  In the following pages, you’re going to hear a lot about Santa’s gadgets. How he uses miniature flying robots, advanced satellites, highly sensitive listening devices, and a warp-drive-powered sleigh that’s capable of bending and twisting space-time to such an extent that it actually slips Santa and his reindeer out of the observable universe. But before we discuss how the jolly old elf uses these futuristic tools to deliver toys to every good girl and boy in the world in just a few hours, one glaring question needs to be addressed.

  Where did he get all this stuff?

  He could not have invented everything himself. If this were the case, he’d need to be both a ridiculously smart scientist and an unbelievably resourceful engineer. He would have had to devise e = mc2 de cades before Einstein. Then he would have had to sprint through the next century of advances in physics, biology, chemistry, and other fields, pushing his understanding of how the universe works, on a large and small scale, to the level of scientists working in, say, the twenty-third century.

  And knowledge would just be the start. He would have had to apply all he knows to develop the actual tools. This is no small feat; rarely has our world seen this combination of thinker and tinkerer. Einstein’s work with light quanta might have laid out the path to modern electronics, but he certainly didn’t build any lasers or scanners himself. For Santa, it wouldn’t have been enough to learn how wormholes, the theoretical shortcuts between one spot in the universe and another, might work. To use these wormholes to whisk himself from one living room to another in less than a second, Santa would have had to figure out how to generate, monitor, and maintain them, too.

  All of which is completely implausible.

  If Santa were really that smart, if he had really figured out relativity years before Einstein, there is no way he would have been able to resist publishing his results. Sure, he’s saintly. But no real scientist can resist letting their contemporaries know when they’ve solved a cosmic conundrum. Isaac Newton kept the calculus to himself for a little while, but once Gottfried Leibniz started boasting about his development of that higher form of mathematics, Newton made a serious effort to ensure that the history books would credit him and not his German rival. If Santa had made all these discoveries, the approval-hungry scientist in him surely would have slipped his findings into a journal or two, to win the approval, if not the worship, of his peers.

  It’s clear, therefore, that someone, or something, provided Santa with the technology he needs. But who?

  A visitor from the future would be a strong candidate, given that the tools Santa uses to complete his rounds have either been developed in recent years, should come to pass in the next few decades, or, in a few extreme cases, don’t exactly have a due date but aren’t prohibited by the laws of the universe as scientists understand them today. In other words, they’re still in the pipeline. And yet here we are, with Santa cranking out and dropping off Christmas gifts at an apparently impossible clip.

  This suggests the possibility that some twenty-third-century inventor living on Earth, or, if we burn out our current home, in an underground base on Mars, must have had, say, a warp-drive-related “Eureka!” moment while sitting in their bathtub. Given the likelihood of water scarcity in a future habitat of this sort, that bathtub might very well have been full of their own recycled, treated, and purified urine, but that presumably didn’t bother them much, since it was probably fairly standard. And it certainly wouldn’t have gotten in the way of their thinking.

  Now, how would that urine-washed thinker’s greatest work find its way back to the North Pole? Time travel? Maybe, but Santa couldn’t jump forward to the future on his own. This is a nice, clean idea—“Hey, this whole reindeer-drawn-sleigh-through-the-snow, carving-my-own-toys-by-hand thing isn’t working, so I better visit the twenty-third century to see if they’ve got anything better”—but it’s just not tenable. We know that Santa is not a science or engineering genius. Originally, he was a shipbuilder. (More on this in chapter 4.) He’s good with tools, but he doesn’t have the brains to invent a time machine.

  The other possibility is that a few people from the future hand-delivered this goodie bag full of tech. To do so, they would have had to time-travel; exactly how they’d do it is difficult to determine. Today there’s nothing like Doc Brown’s flux-capacitor-enabled DeLorean in Back to the Future, and no one is close to perfecting the centuries-hopping phone booth blindly ridden into both the future and the past by Bill S. Preston Esq. and the incomparable Theodore Logan. Modern time machines exist as equations; they are theoretical playthings that physicists explore in the service of learning more about the theoretical underpinnings of the universe. By working to determine whether or not the cosmos would allow a sufficiently advanced civilization to travel to the future or the past, these scientists learn more about our world and the way it works.

  The famous thinker Kurt Gödel, a colleague and friend of Einstein’s when both were working at Princeton University, published one of the first formal mathematical descriptions of time travel in 1949. In Gödel’s version, the universe as described by Einstein’s general theory of relativity could include paths called closed timelike curves. Generally, these off-ramps would allow you to jump in a ship, fly for a while, and end up right back where
you started in space and time. You wouldn’t just go from Los Angeles, soar for a while, and then land back in Los Angeles. You’d show up in L.A. at the same time you left and seriously confuse airport security.

  This isn’t quite the brand of time travel we see in the movies, but it could still be useful. Say you saunter into a meeting or class and find that you’re completely unprepared. If there were a closed timelike curve nearby, you could bring your books, travel along it, study up en route, and then get back to the same place and time fully prepared to wow your colleagues or teacher. The hitch is that Gödel’s model calls for a cosmos that rotates, and astronomers have since discovered that the universe is actually expanding, not spinning. What an idiot.

  For Santa’s purposes, then, Gödel’s version is out.

  Still, there are other options. The physicist Frank J. Tipler has suggested that a massive, infinitely long, spinning cylinder could conceivably create these closed timelike curves. Princeton University’s J. Richard Gott has described a setup involving a pair of cosmic strings—incredibly dense filaments left over from the formation of the universe.

  Meanwhile, Amos Ori, a Technion University physicist, has been working on a more practical scheme. Most time-travel setups require exotic objects. Cosmic strings, special black holes, negative matter—the kind of stuff you can’t really find at Home Depot. But Ori’s version doesn’t require any out-of-this-world ingredients. With his model, all you need to do is harness the power of gravity.

  Granted, his time machine wouldn’t be easy to build. Santa’s friends from the future would need technology that manipulates gravity the way we mess around with light and magnetism. We have no trouble bending, focusing, and intensifying light using devices like lasers. That’s easy. But unless you count video games such as Half-Life 2, which features a gravity gun that allows players to both attract and repel objects, we’re not there yet with the force that brought the apple down on Newton’s head. Gravity has proven to be a little trickier than light.