We have been hearing some awful rumors lately. .Apparently children are ending their timeless belief in Santa Claus in some big numbers. .
Perhaps it is the loss of hope. The lack of love.. the dying of light during the darkness of seasons..
It is unfortunate that so many are losing their age-old eagerness to forgo the earthly credences. Magic used to be alive during this season! You recall, it right?
You were young once (or are now) ..
Those childhood moments when the chill in the air felt more like an zealous burst of energy to your soul! When first snowflakes would fall, it would be true seasonal enchantment in the air..
But we have been informed by sources that overall belief in Santa is hitting an all-time low. Officials report that children, most under 10 years of age, are still able to believe but doubt Santa at a much earlier age as time goes on.
By 11 or 12, they are completely done with leaving cookies and milk and instead think their parents or guardians leave gifts under the tree..
Kids even stop giving carrots for Rudolph at an earlier age..
Hopefully we can out some facts out there about this waning tradition.
TRADITIONS CHANGE
So we wrote the intro to this post with some fun.. We know the truth about Santa, as do you .. deep down, you know. You really know.
You know he is as real as the screen you are reading this on! After all, is anything real?
But all joking and jest aside, yes.. Santa is real.
Some facts you need to read
The USPS believes in Santa.. so he is real.
Operation Santa, according to the USPS’s site, originated in 1912. About 100 years ago, the USPS started receiving letters to Santa Claus and in 1912, Postmaster General Frank Hitchcock decided to allow USPS employees — along with volunteers — to respond to the children’s letters. Now, you don’t even have to physically be at one of these regional post offices to select a letter — you can “adopt” a letter online, write back, and even give children gifts.
You have to write out a formal address to Santa, which is 123 Elf Road, North Pole 88888. (And yes, you still need to use a stamp!)
The science
Let’s cut to the chase..
Back in 2016, a science video showcased the physics behind Santa and why he could exist.. it is great education!
Another video from 2014 gave us another very scientific answer as to whether Santa exists:
Linda Harden—formerly known as The Human Neutrino, outlined her rationale of the existence of Santa Claus:
No known species of reindeer can fly. BUT there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.
There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. BUT since Santa doesn’t (appear to) handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total – 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census)rate of 3.5 children per household, that’s 91.8 million homes. One presumes there’s at least one good child in each.
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 snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding etc.
This means that 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 on earth, 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 pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that “flying reindeer” (see point #1) could pull TEN TIMES the normal anoint, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload – not even counting the weight of the sleigh – to 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison – this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.
353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance – this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecrafts re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per second. Each. In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and 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 centrifugal 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.
And even paranormal radio hosts got into the mix.
Lewis said,
The Santa Claus metaphor would mean nothing to most people but to me it struck me as rather odd considering a meeting I had with physicist Stephen Hawking. Hawking spoke to a crowd at the University of Utah in the 1990’s and I happened to know someone who knew his assistant while he was staying in Utah. Upon meeting Hawking I was a little nervous about telling him what I did for a living. I told him I worked in the media and that I was a talk show host and news reporter. He asked me what kind of topics I covered and I told him I talked about aliens and Conspiracy theories. He was not at all critical of my interest in such things and spoke to me about all kinds of possibilities in the Universe.
He brought up Santa Claus as a model for things that are credulous. However he did make it clear that he was very serious about the issue. He said that in the ether that both Santa and Mickey Mouse can be very real and to a child –the thought is a very powerful agent. Santa Claus is impossible using classical physics, but in a quantum sense Santa can be very real.
I was completely beside myself, here I was in the presence of a genius and all we could discuss is possible proof of Santa Claus.
With the usage of paralleled processing it can be theorized Santa has the ability to do the job he is said to do simultaneously. It is done in the same manner as sending an e-mail to multiple recipients at the same time. Years ago this was unthinkable, today in a split second you can deliver an e-mail to millions of people simultaneously without even having to leave your chair. How can anyone track the speed of that? The possibility to us is limited to the technological practice we take for granted.
There are fewer varieties of toys in the world than e-mail recipients and yet we can’t wrap our minds around the fact that in some future time line the simultaneous appearance of matter cannot be accomplished and yet an e-mail is a thought electronically sent and it is very possible that people in all time zones can receive it.
Fax machines a rarely used today, but there is an argument that can be made about one piece of paper being inserted in a machine in one place and having millions of copies coming out in offices all over the world received by people.
Now, if the next logical leap of science is to take that knowledge of parallel processing and bring it out of the computer and into our material world we can now see that the old traditional Santa Claus model is flawed but the new scientific progress can make the new Santa hypothesis closer to reality
So yeah. All that.
When the idea of Santa not being real comes up to my now 11-year-old son, I answer honestly. As a matter of fact, just the other night in the car he began to press me hard on whether Santa was real and how he could be.
I told him the truth, as I know it from research and science: We live in a multiverse. All things are possible and likely. So Santa, in this multiverse, exists as well. Magic is real on Christmas and, even if we don’t see him or he does bring gifts this year, he is very real.
And by the way.. if he is real, so is Krampus. So be good.. or those ringing bells will bring coal and scorn from the Christmas demon.
So hear’s to keeping it real at Christmas!
Magic exists if you believe.
And since Santa is real, there is no reason magic can’t be either.