by Gregory Mone
But we’re getting off topic. The point here is that de Grey thinks the buildup of this cellular junk over time is one of the factors that contributes to the aging process in our bodies. As a result, he has essentially been trying to devise a way to dispose of the bottles that our cellular recycling machine can’t deal with. He thinks that if you could clean out the lysosomes and crank up the efficiency of the recycling system, you might help stop the body from growing old.
If Santa were to use a SENS-like program, then the lysosome-cleaning process would likely involve periodic injections. Each shot would deliver a selection of enzymes capable of safely finding their way into Santa’s cells and then into the specific machinery. Once inside, they would break down the trash that his own cells couldn’t handle and help keep him fit as a forty-year-old. But that’s a big if. The reality is that we don’t know whether Santa or his lieutenants actually uses a SENS-like program, though the variety and quantity of pills they take and injections they receive hardly rules out the possibility.
In fact, it may be that another one of his programs has a greater impact in terms of extending his life span. Santa’s hibernation system may be an even more powerful weapon in his battle with aging.
10
Why Santa Hibernates
RESOURCE LIMITATIONS, LIFE EXTENSION, AND THE EVER-PRESENT SPECTRE OF INFIDELITY
Hibernation is one of nature’s strangest phenomena. Various mammals enter into prolonged, comalike states to last through the winter. This helps them deal with cold temperatures and limited resources; typically there just isn’t enough food around in those months to support their normally active lifestyles. Hibernating mammals can drop their body temperatures to just above freezing, reduce oxygen consumption to anywhere from one-thirtieth to one-fiftieth of what they typically require, even slow their heartbeats down from hundreds to just three to ten ticks per minute. The core temperature of the Arctic ground squirrel actually drops below freezing.
When the cold months pass, these animals just jump right back up again without missing a step. All their nerves and neurons fire as they did before. Their organs resume their normal duties. Their muscles return to work despite months of torpor. They wake up as if from a long nap.
The idea of human hibernation has always fascinated science fiction writers and personal-injury lawyers. The latter fantasize about clients who incur injuries in automobile accidents, then agree to hibernate afterward, in order to exaggerate the apparent severity of those injuries and appear as if they’ve entered into a coma, which, in turn, would allow the attorneys to collect larger settlements.
But it’s not just lawyers and writers who are drawn to the idea. Real-world researchers have explored the science of hibernation for at least a century. In the 1980s, NASA looked into human hibernation as a means of avoiding some of the problems that would be associated with long-term spaceflight. If you were to put astronauts to sleep during the eighteen-month trip to Mars, for example, they would require less food and water, and they wouldn’t argue, fight, or have sex with one another. The motivation here mirrors Santa’s rationale for putting his lieutenants to sleep. The aliens presented the hibernation program as an option, and Santa chose to put it in play for some very simple reasons.
The lieutenants spend most of the year with Santa and Mrs. Claus up at the North Pole. Keeping more than two hundred men in a confined space, with no access to the outside world and no contact with women, for ten months, would be absolutely foolish. Remember, Santa opted against cloning himself because he feared that one of his genetic twins would pop in Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” and swing Mrs. Claus right into his heart.
Naturally, then, the OC would also worry about the possibility that one of his lieutenants would do the same. Sure, he has come to trust his wife since they left Brooklyn, and he could ask his men to take a vow, sign a contract, etc. But after ten months underground, a few of them would undoubtedly neglect the agreement. Call him paranoid, but Mrs. Claus is a special lady. She’s kind of hot, actually.
At the same time, Santa’s hibernation program may not just be about keeping his jolly lieutenants from sneaking into his candy-cane-and-tinsel-adorned bed. He hibernates too, and his motivation may stem from the apparent antiaging effect.
In 1981, Harvard biologist Charles Lyman published a study that tested this idea on 288 Turkish hamsters. Each hamster was placed in its own cage, provided with food and water, and exposed to ambient light and natural day/night cycles. Half the animals were kept at a constant, warm temperature throughout the experiment, but the others were exposed to much colder air, starting in November and lasting through the winter. Lyman’s idea was to simulate the onset of winter, which triggers hibernation in most mammals. It worked, and in the end, the hamsters that hibernated effectively lived longer than their counterparts, and nearly by the amount of time that they stayed under. In other words, the work hinted that these deep sleeps might delay the aging process.
Hibernation research didn’t exactly stop with Lyman’s paper, but it has gone through varying periods of interest and neglect. NASA’s need to figure out human hibernation was not so pressing, given that the agency isn’t sending any crews to Mars in the near future, so the program was dropped. But now it’s becoming an increasingly active area of research again. Matt Andrews, a biologist at the University of Minnesota, says this stems in part from the fact that scientists are no longer just observing mammals in this state or studying the external cues that initiate and halt the process. Now they’re starting to explore hibernation at the molecular level. They’re beginning to figure out what’s happening on the cellular scale that enables animals to hibernate in the first place.
One of the most exciting findings: The creatures that do hibernate through the winter might not be specially equipped, in a genetic sense. Instead, hibernation-related genes might be common to all mammalian species. It’s possible that bears, squirrels, and the rest are just the only ones putting them to work. Even humans most likely have the genetic machinery. “The genetics hardware is there,” according to Andrews, “but it’s the regulation of these genes, the turning them on and off, that’s so very different between us and the natural hibernators.”
Andrews and other scientists hope that studying the biological mechanisms behind animal hibernation could help with human problems. For example, organ transplantation. Today, an organ that’s removed from a donor has only a limited shelf life, in some cases as few as four or five hours. But if scientists could isolate the proteins and enzymes that work to keep hibernating mammals’ organs in perfect shape during long periods of inactivity by burning fat, conserving glucose, and performing other molecular tricks, they might be able to apply these findings to human hearts and livers. They might be able to figure out a way to store these precious organs for much longer and increase the chances that the neediest patients receive them.
Interest in human hibernation has also intensified thanks to a number of strange, almost impossible-sounding medical cases. In 1995, German scientists reported that a four-year-old boy who had accidentally fallen through ice into a freezing lake was successfully brought back after his heart had not ticked for eighty-eight minutes. His core temperature had dropped down to 67.6 degrees Fahrenheit, and none of the standard resuscitation measures had any effect. A medical rescue team was on the scene relatively quickly and evacuated him by helicopter to a hospital. But his heart didn’t even register a beat until he’d been there for a full twenty minutes. Eventually, though, the boy recovered completely.
Such cases are rare, but a new one of these miracle recoveries does seem to turn up in the journals every few years. A Japanese toddler bounced back after a similar icy plunge; his heart reportedly stopped beating for thirty minutes. Then there’s the story of Mitsutaka Uchikoshi, the famous Bear Man of Japan. He was lost for twenty-four days on an icy mountain in 2006. When he was found, his organs seemed to have shut down. His body temperature had dropped to 71 degrees. His pulse was nea
rly undetectable. He appeared to be dead. He should have been dead. Yet he, too, survived.
While these extreme cases imply that hibernation might be able to put life on hold, they hardly suggest a recipe for an antiaging program. Even Santa’s ever-so-dedicated lieutenants, who give up so much and work so hard to support the spirit of Christmas (and earn the bonus they’re due at the end of each term, along with a fresh new organ or two), would probably revolt if Santa’s robots threw them out in the snow so they could sleep through the winter.
No, the Pole’s hibernation system is far more user-friendly. Santa and Mrs. Claus choose not to hibernate for the full eleven-month term that the lieutenants endure. They prefer to spend a few months at the Pole with just the elves and robots for company, then travel for a few more, mostly via cruise ship, before hibernating for sixteen to twenty weeks. But this has less to do with the hibernation process itself than their desire to spend more time together.
To start the process, the subject reclines in a kind of sleep pod. His core temperature is reduced, his pulse slowed, his metabolism decelerated, his brain activity wound down. An IV, administered by robotic surgeons, provides limited sustenance. His organs continue functioning, though they’re not nearly as active, and, as a result, he wears diapers.
(The technology embedded in the diapers, including a water-attracting, or hydrophilic, nanomesh structure that sucks in and purifies urine, makes the latest Huggies models look like simple paper towels. One can only assume, given the level of complexity of the materials, that the aliens themselves wear diapers and that they do so long past childhood.)
The robotic surgeons refuse to change the hibernating Santas; it’s not clear why. But it can’t have anything to do with pride, given that they have no qualms about wearing the silly outfits Mrs. Claus makes for them. The changing job, therefore, is left to our poor little pointy-eared friends, the elves. They don’t particularly enjoy this task, and more than one elf has, as both a form of protest and as a means of seeking appreciation for the gruesomeness of the assignment, applied in the last few years to be the subject of an episode of Mike Rowe’s Dirty Jobs. As of 2008, however, the producers of that Discovery Channel show had failed to respond to their queries.
PART III
Santa Inc.
11
The Strategic Elvis Convention
HOW SANTA GENERATES REVENUE
Though the aliens provided Santa with plenty of technology, they did not equip him with much cash. This wasn’t important at first, because Santa started small. Initially he limited his rounds to several hundred homes and completed all the deliveries himself. He didn’t have any employees besides the elves, who essentially work for free. But Santa soon realized there was a limit to what he could do by himself. If he wanted to bring joy to tens or hundreds of millions of children, if he really wanted to cover the globe in a single night, he would need lieutenants. So he started hiring.
Unlike his elves, though, these new recruits would not work for candy canes. Sure, he could offer them new organs, weight reduction, life extension through hibernation and periodic injections, and other health benefits. We’ve gone over all that, and it certainly has proven to be a draw for prospective lieutenants. But from the start, Santa saw that it wouldn’t be enough. Inevitably, the men wanted cash, too.
Generating enough money to reward his lieutenants after their five years of service—and finance those costly pre-and post-Christmas getaways—was not easy for Santa. I say Santa, but it’s really Mrs. Claus who spearheads the business side of the outfit. Though we’re often told she is quite a wizard with baked goods, in reality she’s far more comfortable with a spreadsheet than a cookie sheet. (In the off-season she sometimes temps for a few months as an assistant at various Wall Street firms to pick up new trends. She has a wonderful freelance deal with the Swiss bank UBS.)
Mrs. Claus has given Santa a financial and management stake in a surprising number of technology-oriented Fortune 500 companies, but some of the first opportunities she identified were in old-world industries. For one, she essentially created the Christmas ornament business. This move was driven initially by aesthetics; she didn’t like the fact that the living rooms her husband was visiting were filled with sparsely decorated trees, so she began designing ornaments herself. Initially she had Santa and his lieutenants deposit them for free in peoples’ living rooms, but once ornaments became standard, and even desirable, she spearheaded the formation of a number of shadow companies to sell the tree trinkets on the open market. Manufacturing was never an issue; the ornaments self-assemble through a revolutionary, nature-inspired process explored in chapter 32.
Self-assembly has allowed her to keep these shadow companies streamlined, guaranteeing that the maximum possible profits funnel back to the Pole, but it also enables easy upgrades and add-ons. Toward the middle of the twentieth century, for example, Mrs. Claus ordered the addition of miniature listening devices, or bugs, to each of these ornaments. (This is the origin of the time-honored holiday warning “Quiet! My jingle bells are listening.”) The change marked a significant upgrade to Santa’s already robust surveillance network, which will be described in part 4. Let’s just say he knows when—and where—you’ve been sleeping. And since his flying robots detect heat signatures, he can make a pretty good guess as to what you’ve been doing, too.
Mrs. Claus also recognized that Santa would need to maintain a relationship with the window and masonry businesses because of his reliance on wormhole-based time travel. This transportation system isn’t foolproof. Santa’s masonry and construction elves frequently have to upgrade and/or repair the time-travel equipment hidden in the windows and chimneys of the hundreds of millions of homes their boss and his lieutenants visit each year. Mrs. Claus realized that if their elves were going to be servicing these homes to begin with, and if they were forced to become experts in chimneys and windows so that they could retrofit them with the negative-energy generators needed to create the wormhole links between living rooms that enable Santa’s lieutenants to quickly jump from house to house, well, then she might as well just take the next step and start a few companies. This way, they wouldn’t have to be sneaky about getting access, and they’d generate extra revenue.
This is one of the reasons chimney-cleaning companies charge so much: A large portion of their fee goes to the North Pole. It also explains why the workers for such companies are so short and wear woolen caps in even the hottest weather. They’re trying to hide their pointy little ears.
Not convinced? Consider this deft display of Clausian code work, which has eluded all but a few Harvard-trained symbologists. Mrs. Claus, it turns out, embedded a message in one of the first companies she formed as part of this new venture. If you rearrange the letters just so, “Anderson Windows” spells “Kris Kringle.”
Okay, so maybe that’s not true. Maybe you’ve got to switch some of the letters for new ones, too, and subtract a couple. But this doesn’t make her strategy any less brilliant or original. In fact, these businesses are just a slice of Santa’s empire.
Mrs. Claus also pushed for another route to easy wealth: She urged her husband to become a consultant. By the middle of the twentieth century, thanks in large part to the business development efforts of his wife, Santa Claus had built and cultivated advisory relationships with all of the major toy and leisure products companies, specialty goods manufacturers, retailers, and movie studios in the world. (He became friendly with numerous semioticians, too, but again, that was just for kicks. They make him giggle.) In the early years he would visit these clients on their own grounds, typically at night, when he could land his warp-drive-equipped sleigh on a company’s roof without anyone noticing. But this extra travel eventually proved tiresome, and in 1957 he held the first of what would become an annual conference in Las Vegas.
Each year, typically during the first week of January, business leaders from a wide array of companies and industries pay enormous sums of money to listen to Santa and
his lieutenants lecture on a variety of topics. They talk to executives in the home-design and -décor business about the evolving layout of living rooms; they honestly tell Pottery Barn designers how ridiculous those tables constructed from felled Argentinean cypress trees actually look in peoples’ homes. They reveal charts displaying the historical growth of bust size in girls’ dolls and, based on this information, project the ideal ratios for the following year. Linguists are brought in to uncover hidden desires in Christmas wish lists, and Santa’s elves discuss new trends in supply-chain management. The little fellows actually tell Wal-Mart executives how to become more efficient, and they listen.
These lectures are open to all paying attendees; one-on-one meetings with the OC command an additional, much higher, fee. Apparently he gets even more than Bill Clinton.
On the Hollywood side, Santa presents anywhere from thirty to fifty screenplays. Though Santa, Mrs. Claus, and a few of his more creative elves often conceive the plots, his artificially intelligent robotic surgeons actually write the scripts. When they’re not in the operating room, naturally. Many of these films are Christmas themed, and Santa often revises and adds to the works himself. But the robots also produce scripts in the action-adventure, romantic comedy, and horror genres. At the conference, studio executives bid for the rights, and Santa takes a percentage of the gross revenues if a movie is produced. This isn’t a small business: Christmas films alone have earned several billion dollars at the box office, and Santa has taken home roughly 10 percent of that figure. As for other genres, I can’t list specific films, but circumstantial evidence suggests that at least three of the top-ten grossing movies of 2008 were written by robots.
Employees of the Mandalay Bay hotel, the current site of this annual convention, might read these details and say, “Wait, I’m there every January, and I’ve never noticed two hundred old fat guys with white beards milling around with Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, and other luminaries.” But the truth is that you shouldn’t notice, because all of the attendees and all of the presenters, including the OC himself, are required to impersonate Elvis Presley in costume, hairstyle, and diction. So, next time you overhear a pair of Elvis impersonators talking about whether kids prefer PCs or Macs, look again, to see just who it is that’s hiding under that coiffure.