The Truth About Santa

by Gregory Mone

  23

  Santa (Almost) Never Sleeps

  WAKEFULNESS DRUGS, ANTI-SLEEP COMPOUNDS, AND EIGHT HOURS OF SHUT-EYE CRAMMED INTO A MINUTE

  Santa and his lieutenants rarely sleep during their Christmas Eve deliveries, but an hour or so is necessary here and there. They fight fatigue with a combination of brain-pod-released drugs that allow them to stay awake, working effectively, for several days at a clip. And that hour of shut-eye is an extremely powerful nap. It’s the equivalent of eight to ten hours of normal sleep.

  Clearly this alien-developed sleep-drug regimen is far beyond anything we have at our disposal today, but modern pill developers are making progress. Military studies have demonstrated that one of today’s leading anti-sleep drugs, modafinil, allows people to remain alert and functioning for nearly forty-eight hours without any side effects. (Clubgoers have doubtless tested this even further, but the results of those studies have not been published.) The added bonus is that there’s no need to catch up afterward, no need to lie in bed for a day to return to baseline. Patients can sleep for eight hours and wake up feeling fully restored.

  Scientists aren’t quite sure how modafinil and its upgrade, armodafinil, work their wonders, but the drugs appear to act on the brain’s dopamine system. Unlike standard stimulants, though, they don’t seem to lead to addiction. Another class of drugs, called ampakines, has also been shown to help maintain cognitive performance while keeping subjects awake. In one study, sleep-deprived monkeys that had been given an ampakine-based drug actually performed better on tests than subjects that had enjoyed a full night’s rest.

  These are just the pills that keep you awake, though. Scientists are also developing a new class of compounds that will guarantee a good night’s sleep. Some of today’s common sleep medications effectively just knock you out and make you think you had a good night’s rest. They can leave you feeling drowsy and confused throughout the following day and prone to side effects like sleep-eating (which is kind of funny) and sleep-driving (not so funny). The effect is comparable to a college kid throwing back seven beers in the hour before he goes to bed. He might fall asleep instantly. He might not venture out of his room again for twelve hours. But that doesn’t mean he’s going to feel good when he does.

  The goal of this new class of drugs, on the other hand, is to cram the very real physiological effects of a deep, long visit to dreamland into just a few hours. The recent advances in this field—both with sleep-promoting compounds and so-called wakefulness drugs like modafinil—have prompted some scientists to speculate that we could be headed toward a world in which sleep essentially becomes a choice. People will be able to remain awake for twenty-two hours, jam a full night’s rest into the time it takes to watch a movie, and get up out of bed feeling perfectly restored.

  Santa’s molecular cocktail doesn’t work quite in that way; the drugs released via the brain-pod delivery system that’s surgically implanted in every new lieutenant keeps them alert and functioning fantastically for three days. After each seventy-one-hour period, during which a given lieutenant visits 8,520 homes, he stops and sleeps on one lucky family’s living room couch for an hour. Then he’s up and out and roaming through space-time again, completely refreshed and reenergized. Over the course of a given Christmas Eve, each Santa goes through roughly 95 cycles, working for a total of 6,745 hours while sleeping for just 95 hours. No wonder they don’t mind hibernating when they’re done.

  The bug in this sleep/work program is free will. Each lieutenant retains it, and despite their nearly slavish dedication to the Christmas cause, on occasion, they decide to exercise it. Every once in a while, one of them realizes he really doesn’t want to get back into the wormhole. He decides he wants to relax, lie down for a bit longer, maybe think about what Mrs. Claus will be wearing when she whips up her next batch of cookies. LiSTS repeatedly pings him with alerts (which he can see in the heads-up display in his spectacles), urging him to move on. If this fails, elves are brought in to reason with him. But he often tells them to go f!*$ a candy cane and wake him in another hour.

  Time travel might seem like an easy solution to this problem. If one of these Santas takes an extra hour of rest, he can just travel back an extra hour to make it up, right? Yes, but he also increases the risk of running into one of his other selves. Remember: Every time Santa travels back in time, he essentially creates an extra version of himself. The initial lieutenant, who travels from the North Pole to the first house, creates a copy of himself when he travels back in time as he moves to the next house, because he’s still in that first house, too.

  Sure, LiSTS follows them all, but when one of these men decides to stay on the couch for a little longer than planned, he ruins all that logistical route-planning work his elfish handler completed beforehand. By changing the timing of everything, he risks encountering one of these time-travel-created copies of himself, who might be popping into a house across the street. In some instances, therefore, this apparently harmless refusal to rise from the couch forces LiSTS to rearrange massive numbers of deliveries. That can be incredibly stressful on the system; even alien software can crash.

  You’d have to imagine that the lazy lieutenant would absolutely infuriate all the other copies of himself whose schedules he disrupts. At the same time, they’d probably get over it pretty quickly once they realized that it was really themselves that they were getting mad at. They might even sympathize and eventually conclude that they must have really needed the sleep.

  So, although it is often said that the hardest person to forgive is yourself, when you’re talking about a wormhole-time-travel-generated copy, this isn’t really the case. It’s actually pretty easy.

  24

  A Note About Whether or Not Reindeer Can Really Fly

  No.

  25

  Reindeer and Public Relations

  THE UNEXPECTED BENEFITS OF ENDANGERED SPECIES STATUS, AND WHY PUPPIES WOULDN’T BE MUCH GOOD AT PULLING SANTA’S SLEIGH

  If reindeer can’t fly, why does Santa keep them around? Three reasons, one of which I can’t divulge and another that we’ll get to later. But first, and most important, he needs them for public relations.

  The science and strategy of PR is complex enough when put to work for political figures, companies, and governments. But quasi-mythological figures require far more ingenuity. The closest analogue is celebrity PR, one of the goals of which is to convince, or at least remind, the fan base that the individual is, indeed, a real person, someone who plays with his or her kids, walks the dog, shops for groceries. The challenge with Santa is far grander, though, since he can’t appear on talk shows or attend trendy parties or gallery openings or give glossy celebrity mags the chance to publish pictures of his goings-on about town. A central part of the Santa story is that he is not really a part of our world. He exists on the periphery, in secret, and visits only once per year. Granted, he can upgrade and sharpen his image through the publication of books or the production of Christmas-themed movies, but his only opportunity for direct, real-world PR presents itself on that single night. Therefore, his best opportunity to keep the story of Santa alive in the hearts and minds of children is to appear before them in all his jingling glory.

  Cute and cuddly looking, reindeer are nearly ideal from a marketing perspective. The only creatures that score higher on emotional resonance tests are puppies, but Santa couldn’t really have a puppy-drawn sleigh. Who would believe that? They’re too small, too unfocused. Plus, it would be bad PR to have small animals pulling you around. It works them too hard.

  At the same time, reindeer are also fairly impractical, which is why the OC is the only one of all the Santas who uses them. You don’t need them to jump through a wormhole. They are loud, smelly, always hungry, and occasionally cantankerous. They’re prone to defecating on rooftops, and it’s the OC’s responsibility to clean up their droppings, which, because they are spherical, and often frozen, have a tendency to roll down into the bushes that surround the
average home. When this happens, Santa may end up wasting fifteen or twenty minutes scouring the shrubbery, digging through the snow in search of their crap. At least with puppies, the stuff would be small enough that he could just pretend it didn’t happen. The homeowners would never notice.

  Kids are another factor, of course. They just love reindeer. They love to hear the footsteps, the jingling of the bells on those leathery collars. They love to look across the way at a neighbor’s house and see reindeer stomping over the slate roof, arching up and into the sky. They rush back into the house, alerting brothers, sisters, parents. The next morning they call their friends and cousins: “Santa is real! I saw him last night, with the sleigh and the reindeer and everything!”

  Now, Santa wouldn’t want just anyone making that call. To increase the impact of these eyewitness accounts, Santa generally tries to be seen mostly by influential children, those whom other kids would be more likely to believe. (His lieutenants, as we already established, try to avoid all contact, but since Santa doesn’t time-travel, it’s okay for him to be seen.) It wouldn’t do much good, from a PR standpoint, to appear to a young fabulist, who might then be mocked at school for his testimony. Santa is also careful not to allow mentally or psychologically unstable children a glimpse, since he wouldn’t want them screaming about the existence of Santa Claus only to have their parents whisk them to the doctor for an increased dose of medication. In this sense, Santa’s operation functions less like a religion than a business. His public-relations effort is focused on leaders and decision-makers among the youth, not the downtrodden.

  Yet children aren’t his only target demographic. The OC also tries to ensure that a handful of environmentalists and animal biologists spot his reindeer each year, since the natural population of the beasts has been imperiled of late by climate change. Reindeer could become an endangered species if Earth’s recent warming trend continues, and these appearances are Santa’s way of informing environmentalists that he is on their side. He still has some work to do here, though, given his old ties to the coal industry.

  But there’s a gap in this story, an inconsistency, since we’ve already established that reindeer can’t fly. If that’s the case, how is it that these children and adults see them coasting off rooftops and into the night air? And how does the OC travel all the way from the North Pole if he’s opposed to wormholes, anyway?

  26

  Turn Up the Warp Drive, Rudolph!

  HOW SANTA USES EXTRADIMENSIONAL TRICKERY TO SPEED ACROSS THE PLANET

  At one point in the movie The Santa Clause, the lead character, played by Tim Allen, stumbles when his son asks him how reindeer can fly. First he attributes this apparent capability to the aerodynamic effects of their antlers. Then he says that they’re weightless. But Berkeley astrophysicist Richard Muller suggests that reindeer flight is actually an illusion. The reality, he says, is much simpler: “They’re just really good leapers.”

  Now, he doesn’t mean they can jump across states or countries. They don’t get a big running start in Greenland and jump all the way to Green Bay. Instead, it may be that they can leap very well over short distances. From one rooftop to another that’s close by, for example. It’s not these short jumps that cause people to conclude that reindeer can fly, however. It’s when the reindeer soar off the top of a house and seem to disappear. Witnesses assume that this apparent disappearance is an illusion. The reindeer must have accelerated to such a speed that they vanished. But that’s not right at all. No, the roots of this flying-reindeer myth lie in Santa’s warp-drive-powered sleigh.

  Santa never stays in one neighborhood for very long, and on a given Christmas Eve, he likes to visit at least five continents and upwards of twenty countries. Even a rocket-powered sleigh wouldn’t be fast enough to keep him on schedule. And, as we’ve mentioned already, he’s opposed to wormhole-based time travel, so that’s not an option, either. As a result, when Santa needs to get from one part of the world to another, he uses warp drive.

  The big idea behind warp drive, a concept that turns up in countless science fiction novels and movies, from Star Wars to Star Trek, is fairly simple. Even though Albert Einstein imposed a kind of speed limit on the universe, insisting that nothing can move faster than the speed of light, or three hundred million meters per second, warp drive suggests that there might be a way around it. Instead of moving through space, you move space itself.

  Think of one of those moving sidewalks in large airports and malls. There’s probably a limit to how fast a human can run on the carpet alongside that people mover. But if you took the fastest man in the world, had him sprint for a stretch along that carpet, and then asked him to do the same on the moving sidewalk, he’d break his own record. In other words, he can only run so fast on the floor, but if you move the floor, too, he’ll speed up.

  Warp drive has a few different incarnations, but the models generally work according to this principle of moving space instead of moving through space. In one of the best-known models, the drive contracts the space-time in front of it and expands the space-time behind it. So, if you’re trying to get from point A to B using this system, it effectively pushes A away from you and pulls B toward you. Rather than asking you to travel to your destination, it brings your destination to your doorstep.

  Expanding, contracting, or warping space isn’t simple, but it can be done. Planets, stars, and other massive bodies exert such a tremendous gravitational force on the space around them that they bend it, turning straight lines into curves. Doing this around a warp-drive ship, though, would require an equally enormous amount of energy packed into a much smaller space. In fact, one of the original warp-drive designs, proposed by Miguel Alcubierre in 1994, called for more energy than the universe has to offer. (Not to mention that this energy would actually have to be “negative energy,” which might not even exist.) Still, it’s not all bad news. Scientists have since revised Alcubierre’s idea and brought those power requirements down to levels just short of impossible. They’ve also been thinking up clever new ways to actually make the warp drive work.

  Recently, Baylor University physicists Richard Obousy and Gerald Cleaver proposed that it might be possible to expand and contract space by messing with the universe’s extra dimensions. By “extra” they’re referring to spatial dimensions other than the normal three we’re accustomed to: width, depth, and height. Obousy and Cleaver say that expanding an extra dimension would lead to a contraction of space. Shrinking one, on the other hand, could end up causing that section of space to blow apart. So, the idea behind their warp drive is that if you could stretch one of these added dimensions in front of the ship—perhaps by using some variation of dark energy, the force that scientists think may be pushing the cosmos apart—and shrink one behind the ship, you’d push point A away from you and pull point B closer.

  Yet this technique wouldn’t be ideal for Santa. It would be too destructive. Obousy suggests thinking of the warp drive’s route as a giant, elongated rectangle that stretches from your takeoff point to your destination. When the drive is switched on, the space between the ship and its destination is compacted. Everything in that rectangle is crushed.

  Now imagine that Santa is making his rounds, and a passenger jet flies through his path. Since all that space would be shrunk to nearly nothing, the plane would be, too. Not a very merry Christmas for those passengers.

  In reality, Santa’s technology is closer to another recent warp-drive design, developed by the physicist Chris Van den Broeck. In this version, the drive encloses the ship in an isolated bubble of space-time, but this pocket universe is only connected to our normal, visible world by a tiny throat. If our world is that piece of paper we talked about in the wormhole chapter, the warp-drive bubble is a little balloon sitting on top, barely touching our universe.

  As with wormholes, there aren’t really any good analogies for this sort of phenomenon, since we’re not really equipped to visualize extra dimensions or higher universes, but it might
be worthwhile to consider the advantages of this model in terms of boats. Think of a standard jet as a tugboat. It sits low in the water and has to push a great deal of water out of the way to move, so it’s slow. Van den Broeck’s warp drive, in comparison, would be more like a hydrofoil, wherein only a fraction of the vehicle is actually touching the water. The hydrofoil and the warp-drive ship have less contact with the water and space-time, respectively, so it’s easier for them to move.

  There are safety advantages, too. Because the bubble’s throat, or connection to our normal universe, is small, the warp drive’s footprint in our world is tiny, too. As a result, the section of space it expands and contracts is also much smaller. That rectangle Obousy referred to shrinks in height and width. It’s just a tremendously long sliver of space that gets crushed, and Santa avoids killing airline passengers and innocently coasting flocks of birds.