December 12, 2012

Santa Claus: Threat or Menace?

I have discovered Santa Claus' secrets. He is a tricky wily jolly old elf, and his exact methods are hard to pin down. The man is at least 800 years old, doesn't age, has had more names over his career than Prince, can seemingly travel at the speed of light at a whim with enough elf sweat shop toys in tow to put every toy retailer out of business,. In addition the man routinely breaks into peoples houses and takes their 'milk and cookies', meanwhile leaving behind his ill gotten toys.

The fact that NORAD tracks him every year does nothing to help my suspicions. Clearly they think him a threat to international stability

So how does Mr. Kringle accomplish this superhuman feat annually? 800 years ago giving gifts to every christian child was difficult with modern technology but it has only gotten worse since then. Of the approximately 7 billion people that exist at this moment, 2.2 billion of them consider themselves Christians, I'm willing to venture that a fair number of people celebrate the holiday otherwise. North America, South America, Europe, Australia, Sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia are predominantly Christian and so most of the population likely celebrates the holiday regardless of religious affiliation. So we'll say an even 3 billion celebrate Christmas. According to the CIA, 26.3% of the world is under 14, and are thus children applicable for him to give gifts to. That's 789 million kids out there. With an average population density of 13.3 people per sq. km (that's 34.5/ sq. mi). Doing the math that's 58 million sq. km (or 22 million sq mi) to cover in a single 24 hr period (which is being charitable). For perspective the entire Earth is about 510 million sq km (197 million sq. mi)

 In order for St. Nick to accomplish that he'd have to be moving around 16 million m/s, that's about 5% of the speed of light (It's probably even more than that since I calculated plain km, not sq km, but just to be on the conservative end of the spectrum). Air molecules vibrate around a couple 100 mi/hr, this means as far as Santa and the reindeer are concerned  the molecules in the air are hanging there frozen. Aerodynamics no longer apply, normally air would get out of the way, but because of the speed of the sleigh, it collides with the front reindeer and begins a fusion reaction , each collision giving off gamma rays and scattered particles. This would cause an explosion everywhere he went, destroying every place he goes to.

Now clearly Santa can't do this, at least not without destroying 2/3's of the landmass. So how does Father Christmas do it? Well, perhaps we're wrong in thinking about time linearly. If Santa were able to bend time and space it would make the whole thing a different possibility.If he were able to say... make space bend he would also be able to store that many toys in a bag and on his sleigh.

What's interesting is that Santa has taken on many different appearances over the years. He's taken on many different names: Kris Kringle, Father Christmas, Tomte, St. Nick, Sinterklauss, Belsnickel and many many others.

So the man has many different bodies, is practically immortal, can bend space and time, and has a sleigh that can clearly hold more than its dimensions should indicate.



Santa Claus is clearly a Time Lord....


No comments:

Post a Comment