This time of year, it’s nearly impossible to walk anywhere without bumping into a Santa. They’re outside the grocery stores, in the malls, on all types of packaging you can imaging, from soda bottles to boxes of all shapes and sizes. It’s enough to drive you just a little bit crazy.
Well, before you get to going berzerk, let’s count down the most memorable Sci Fi/Fantasy Pop Culture Santas, shall we? Here we go, from #5 to #1, they are…
5. Jack Skellington
Here’s a would-be Santa who really tries his best to bring Christmas to other parts of the calendar. Of course, he has to have the real Santa kidnapped first, which results in Santa being held captive by Oogie Boogie and that’s the the first thing that doesn’t go as planned. Poor Jack gives it a noble go, though, in Tim Burton’s Holiday Classic The Nightmare Before Christmas.
4. Robot Santa (Futurama)
Fans of Futurama know this character well, despite his only appearing in a handful of episodes, the death-dealing Robot Santa (who never actually deals death, like all good cartoon bad guys, he’s a terrible shot) dishes out Silent Nights of a different sort. We know two things about Robot Santa:
1. You do NOT want to be on this dude’s naughty list.
2. We DO love Futurama Christmas episodes featuring the armor-plated semi-bad Santa-bot. And now that Futurama is coming back (with the original cast…again), perhaps we’ll soon be stuffing our stockings with more!
3. Santa Claus from Santa Claus Conquers the Martians
Oh boy, where do we start? Well, we start with DavidM’s discovery of the condensed version of this film: here. There’s not too much more to say about this one, except that for a B-grade film, this incarnation of Santa as the Martian-taming toy master is oddly, if slightly disarmingly, charming. Of course, if you love schlock, or if you’re just a sucker for punishment (charming or no, this is probably best viewed with the, uh, “higher test” egg nog), you can watch the entire movie here (legally): Santa Conquers the Martians on Archive.org
2. Santa Science
This one is the subject of a pretty popular chain email this time of year. You’ve probably seen it, but if you haven’t, then I’ll fill you in. Someone applied a scientific analysis to Santa and his toy delivery operation and come out with an article that they claim throws the idea of Santa into serious doubt.
BUT WAIT! Along came a rebuttal that goes through the original anaylsis and offers reasons and suggestions as to why Santa very well could exist, concluding by saying, “Santa has NOT been burned to a cinder, he has NOT been squished by the acceleration of his sleigh, and (though I’m quite certain he won’t be visiting that Engineer’s house,) Santa Claus IS coming to town!”
It’s all very scientific (or not at all), but regardless, they’re a lot of fun. Take both with a grain of salt and enjoy them for the Santa-related diversions that they are…millions of other folks have, too. Below, I present first the original analysis and then the rebuttal.
I. 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 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 house hold, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming that there is at least one good child in each.
II. 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.
III. 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).
IV. 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 centrifugal 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.
Meaning if Santa ever did exist, he’s in traction now.
Source: http://www.inflection-point.com/jokes/86.htm
And the rebuttal, which I’ve pared down due to length (it’s quite in-depth)…
If people are going to attempt to apply science to the question of Santa, the least they can do is to get it right. The so-called “Engineer” that wrote the paper suggesting that Santa Claus is dead had it all wrong.
A) In paragraph 5, the Engineer states that “600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance.” Assuming that this true, it may well be that the reindeer are protected by some sort of heat shield, which is the basis of the “red nose” legend. More to the point, the “air resistance” theory is a vast oversimplification, and a sloppy one at that. In comparing a parachute to a javelin, one can see that there is no simple, direct, predictable relationship between the weight of an object and its air resistance. The air resistance theory completely ignores many possible configurations of Santa’s team that could greatly reduce air resistance.
(…)
Therefore, contrary to the Engineer’s conclusion, the possible existence of unknown, very small, very strong, flying creatures is indicated, and all of the Engineer’s statistics on the mass, speed, capacity, and durability of standard Reindeer are therefore irrelevant.
B) If we accept the notion that Santa moves from East to West (an assumption that the Engineer makes in Paragraph 3) then we must also assume that he is moving in a vaguely North-South traversing path as he works his way West. This implies that, if he chose to, he could make several stops at the Pole to re-load the sleigh, and therefore it is not necessary for him to carry the entire payload all at once as described by the Engineer. (…)
C) Consider that most chimneys are too small to accommodate an average-sized man, let alone a 250 (plus) pound man. This implies that Santa has a way of entering and exiting dwellings through access paths much smaller than those that would otherwise be required. If the same technique that Santa uses to transport himself and the gifts past locked doors also decreases mass (or makes it irrelevant), then the payload problem is completely solved. (Note that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.)
D) If we accept the notion that Santa’s intelligence gathering is good enough for him to determine who is bad/good, sleeping/awake etc., then it stands to reason that Santa also knows enough about health problems, travel plans, hurricanes, floods, drive-by shootings, fires, volcanoes, earthquakes, bus crashes, burglaries, etc. etc. etc. to be able to defer or advance some of his deliveries for days or even weeks, thus considerably extending the 31 hour time limit (as mentioned by the Engineer in paragraph 3) for perhaps 3 to 5 percent of children.
E) In paragraph 3, the Engineer admits to the assumption that Christian homes are randomly distributed over the entire surface of the planet. In reality, a majority of the earth’s surface is covered by the oceans, and a great portion of what is left is covered by mountains, deserts, forests, jungles, glaciers, smaller bodies of water, and other natural and man-made features that render the space uninhabitable by humans — or at least extremely sparsely populated by Christians, who largely tend to live in communities with homes placed in neat rows on level ground, or in densely populated vertical blocks in urban areas.
Also, many families tend to gather for the Holidays, thus decreasing the number of Christian dwellings that are actually occupied on December 24-25. Therefore, the aforementioned assumption leads to a *staggering* overestimate of the number of times Santa must travel distances exceeding 60 feet. Also note that this more realistic model includes trans-oceanic voyages during which Santa could take a “bathroom break.”
F) As far as the snacks go, it is clear that between the households where the parents eat the snacks prior to Santa’s arrival and the households that don’t leave snacks at all, Santa has to deal with a snack in only a small proportion of cases. This means that at every stop Santa must, at a minimum, fill stockings and distribute gifts. The other tasks are performed in much smaller proportions.
(…)
In conclusion – all of the Engineer’s calculations are based on figures that are massively skewed, always choosing the worst-case value. The distances to be traveled, the number of stops to be made, the amount of work to be performed, and the amount of cargo to be carried are all FAR smaller than the Engineer estimates.
Santa has NOT been burned to a cinder, he has NOT been squished by the acceleration of his sleigh, and (though I’m quite certain he won’t be visiting that Engineer’s house) Santa Claus IS coming to town!
Source: http://www.inflection-point.com/jokes/122.htm
1. The Original Santa Claus
What? You mean not beefed up with armor plating or sporting some sort of magic? Yep, I mean plain ‘ol Santa. If you can call him plain. Consider that given the scientific back-and-forth above, this guy withstands powerful forces of nature in nothing more than a velvet-lined coat. He flies around the world…by way of reindeer. And to top that all off, he has a bag which holds enough toys for thousands upon thousands of kids, and yet fits in the back of a sleigh and further compresses to slightly less than the dimensions of a chimney, along with Santa. Make no mistake about it, the “Jolly Old Elf” is a man of magic in his own right. Making him, in his original incarnation, the number one sci-fi and/or fantasy pop culture Santa.
Did I miss one? Fill in the gaps by posting a comment below.
Happy Holidays!
