The Reality of Being Santa

This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. Dinosaurs walked the Earth 180 million years ago. But you know, cancer was part of their story too. Scientists have found tumors in ancient fossils. Well, that is a part of the reason why cancer is a big part of our story, right? It's the other side of evolution. It's the most complex disease that we face. There are more than 200 types of cancer in total, each with distinct characteristics, challenges and mysteries. And that complexity demands scale. Cancer Research UK is the world's largest charitable funder of cancer research with more than 4,000 scientists, doctors and nurses working across more than 20 countries in the search for answers. And then, sharing their discoveries beyond borders. And the impact of this collaboration is clear because over the last 50 years, the charity's pioneering work has helped to double cancer survival in the UK. That is more people who are living longer, better lives. Bossles can show us the past, but research is shaping the future. And for more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org-forward-slash-rest-is-science. This episode is brought to you by Project Hail Mary, the new spectacular space adventure coming to cinemas. Okay, hypothetically, imagine that there's this mission to save our world. Only you can do the job, as this expert in mathematics and science, how do you think you would do? Terribly. But not because I love teaching and learning, because I'm a scaredy cat. But what about yourself, Hannah? I'm back myself, Michael. I think I'd be good. I just, I'd just be very slow. I think the point is that no one should rely on Hannah or I to save the world. But in Project Hail Mary, Ryan Gosling stars as science teacher, Ryland Grace, who is sent unexpectedly on an impossible mission to space to discover why the sun and stars are dying. He teams up with an unimaginable ally to defy all odds and save the universe from extinction. See Project Hail Mary in cinemas and IMAX from Thursday the 19th of March. You can also catch it early on Saturday the 14th of March, Friday and Sunday the 15th of March. Hey, this is Michael and Hannah from Goal Hangers, The Rest of Science. This episode is brought to you by Project Hail Mary, the new spectacular space adventure coming to cinemas. Okay, hypothetically, imagine that there's this mission to save our world. Only you can do the job, as this expert in mathematics and science, how do you think you would do? Terribly. But not because I love teaching and learning, because I'm a scaredy cat. But what about yourself, Hannah? I'm not back myself, Michael. I think I'd be good. I just, I'd just be very slow. I think the point is that no one should rely on Hannah or I to save the world. But in Project Hail Mary, Ryan Gosling stars as science teacher, Ryland Grace, who is sent unexpectedly on an impossible mission to space to discover why the sun and stars are dying. He teams up with an unimaginable ally to defy all odds and save the universe from extinction. See Project Hail Mary in cinemas and IMAX from Thursday, the 19th of March. You can also catch it early on Saturday, the 14th of March, Pi Day, and Sunday, the 15th of March. Hello and welcome to the Rest Is Science. I'm Michael Stevens, creator of the Vsauce YouTube channel. And I'm Professor Hannah Fry. Welcome to our Christmas edition. Yeah, look at us. We're in our Christmas jumpers. My actual tensile. You have actual tensile on yours? This isn't very Christmas themed. It's like a cat in a potted plant. But my wife bought matching jumpers for me, her, and my daughter, for my daughter's first Christmas. And it's what we wore. And so for me, it's very, very Christmasy. Yeah, it's the real true heart of Christmas, right? The fact that you get to be connected with family. That's right. And today we're going to get to the heart of Christmas. I'm talking physics. I'm talking Santa Claus. Okay. Now, there's an old chestnut, an old roasted chestnut, where physicists talk about could Santa really do it? Okay. How could Santa visit every single child who celebrates Christmas across the world in one night only? And without magic, or without some kind of fancy alien technology, it's not possible. Obviously, what Santa is doing is compressing space time, right? In front of the slaves using an alkylbeary drive is expanding space time behind him. He's like surfing the resulting bubble fast on the speak of rights, classic Santa physics. Easy. True. And I think the alkylbeary drive would also protect Santa from G forces. Yeah. Because just for those who aren't familiar, an alkylbeary drive is a hypothetical method of transportation where instead of propelling yourself through space, you change space itself. You can compress space ahead of you and travel light years at a time in a blink of an eye. And you're not violating physics because you aren't moving faster than light. You aren't moving anything faster than light. You're just changing the shape of space. Exactly. Except that it's not hypothetical because we know that that is the only way that Santa could be. It must exist because Santa somehow manages to do it. That's correct. Without such a drive, Santa would be experiencing 17,000 times earth gravity forces as he twisted and turned. I guess the thing is Santa hasn't had much competition over the years, right? Probably because he's mastered how to warp space time. But if you sort of take that away, was there a point in history where Santa could have existed using only the powers of physics that are available to us mere mortals? Today, Hannah and I are asking, when could a regular person have competed with Santa? When could you also have visited every living human in one night and given them a gift? Because right now, you've got 8 billion people on the earth, right? This is too many. We're all spread out. We're all over the place. Too spread out. If we rewind the clock a little bit, I think we might be able to give Santa a run for his money. Alright, so first things first, let's understand who Santa is. Like, let's rewind the clock. Where's it all begin? The story of St. Nicholas. I think everyone knows that that's roughly the lineage of Father Christmas. But he is quite the historical figure. This is a Greek bishop in the fourth century. A real person. He was famous for defending Christianity, also for giving gifts. But specifically, there are stories about him giving gifts to a poor father who had three daughters. Didn't have any money for a dowry. So, St. Nicholas decides to drop off bags of gold just to make all their lives much better. But one version has him throwing the gold in through the window and landing in their stockings that are drying by the fire. Oh! That's where the stockings come from. That's where the stockings come from. It's kind of a real person. I mean, I think some of it is slightly embellished over time. When did this happen? When was St. Nicholas supposedly alive? This is a fourth century around about. He also was present at the first council of Nysia. And there was this big heated theological argument between him and one of the priests. And St. Nicholas lost his temper, punched him in the face. Which means that that tradition of Christmas arguments is also Stem's directly. Oh, I love that. Stem's directly from the other. I love that. One of the other stories about him, by the way, is that he... There was some innocent men, three innocent men, sailors, I think, who were about to be punished beheaded in a town square. And there's a story that apparently St. Nicholas appeared out of nowhere, teleported, in my opinion, and appeared at the moment of the heading and grabbed the sword of the executioner, saving these innocent men from being executed. Hannah, is anyone really innocent? No. Thank you. We can investigate that more in a future episode. This is all happening said in the fourth century. That means the five hundredths. Okay, so this is St. Nicholas, we're talking three hundredths. We're talking the three hundredths. That's where we are. So the three hundredths, which is the fourth century since time zero. Yeah. And Galie, that's a long time ago. Yeah. So here is the thing, okay. Imagine being like a famous person now, right? Like, you know, Taylor Swift, right? The biggest star in the entire world. Every day. Well, imagine it being two thousand years later, seventeen hundred years later, and her still being so famous that is recognized around the world. Her sort of her, her, her kind of metaphorical version of her is still recognized around the world. That is, that is phenomenal work. I mean, what a guy. There's one more thing actually about St. Nicholas that remains a great mystery to us today. So his, his bones are in Bahrain, Italy. They're in this tomb. And actually, there was this really big dramatic event where people went in and stole his skeleton seven years under after his death. So it came under the control of the, of the Turks and then took it to Italy. Anyway, his bones were put in this tomb in the year 1887. And ever since then, every year, it secretes a liquid from the inside of the tomb. And every year they go in and they collect the liquid. It's about 50 miles of liquid. And the Catholic Church say, this is a supernatural event. The secretion of the bones of St. Nicholas. I have never heard of that before. I know. They, they call it mana. And they dilute it with holy water and sell it. And they sell it. It's, it's probably condensation. I've got to be honest with you, but don't worry about that. Don't let that stand in the way. It might contain some traces of human remains. Not just human remains, Santa remains. Santa remains. I also think that it could, it could just be that he wants everyone to know that his bones are magical. Before he sort of left his earthly body and, you know, it became the Santa that we know today. This is really deep. I mean, I really love how immortality can be achieved if you're willing to allow your ghost to like completely change into something different. You know, I think St. Nicholas was probably like, yeah, Christmas is about Christ and the birth of our Savior. And now he's like the counter choice. It's like, well, you know, because Santa doesn't do any religious stuff. It's not like he, he brings happiness to all men and women and children. That's, that's a pretty religious thing, isn't it? I mean, I grew up in like the kind of church that was very much like Santa is essentially an arm of Satan because it distracts from the true message of Christmas and the grace of the Lord. Wow. And instead we all go, ooh, let's buy things. Let's give gifts. Right. And the gift came from Santa, not Jesus. Like he's kind of like the boring part of Christmas. What did that just that? It would have been like non-denominational Protestant, boring on evangelical. I was brought up Catholic. I was going to find with it. You guys were fine with it. I went, my Irish mom less though, but the church in general was okay with it. Right. This is the guy we're up against, right? He's got a long old history. He's been famous for millennia. He's got magical bones. He throws coins into stockings through windows. He teleports executions and saves innocent people from death. You're up against a lot before we've even started with the presence. Yeah. I think we just have to accept that we can't compete with any of that stuff. But actually, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I plan to compete with that. I plan on also having weeping bones. There are services that you can pay for that will make sure your bones create liquid for millennia. Okay. But wait, the bones aren't really what we're after. We're after delivering gifts to every human in one night. We're going to have to find a time in history when there were fewer people. The first thing we talked about Hannah was population bottlenecks. These are moments where for various reasons, the human population like shrunk or couldn't grow and it stayed somewhere really low. Like the first thing I thought of was the Tobe of bottleneck, which is hypothetical. Big volcano in Indonesia, right? Yeah. What like 74,000 years ago, it affected the climate massively. The main theory is that the ash cloud would have changed the weather, the amount of sunlight getting to earth, the temperatures on earth, and it would have been very hard for early homosapiens to live and to thrive. So the population of humans on the entire planet may have dropped as low as like 70,000. Because when you say that there was a lot of ash from this volcano, I mean, we're talking, we're talking, this is the apocalypse, basically. Yeah. I mean, this is like 2,800 cubic kilometers of material. Cheap. Basically enough ash to cover the entire UK in a layer that's taller than Big Ben. Wow. It's phenomenal. The amount of ash that this thing spat out. But there are some people that think there was like 10 years of volcanic winter, that plants would have suffered, that access to food more generally would have been really difficult. And there was a theory in the 90s and early 2000s that actually almost all of humanity was wiped out by this event. Yeah. We almost didn't make it. In fact, the original theory was that at some point maybe 74,000 years ago, there were only like 1000 humans on Earth. And we are all the descendants of those 1000 who survived the Toba Super eruption. Now, that's a sad story, but we're bringing it up because as tragic as that moment could have been, it would have been wonderful for us trying to compete with Santa because there's only a thousand people. And if you could ride around on a reindeer or have them pull a sleigh, they can sprint at like 80 kilometers an hour. You could visit a lot of people in a night because you've got how many hours of night, like 30 more than 30 hours. Well, yeah, it depends on how far north you are, I guess. It does depend on how far north you are. That's how long the night is going to be. Luckily, you can do this in the winter. So if you're in the northern hemisphere, you're going to have a much longer night. You can follow that terminator line of night and day as it goes around Earth. And once you go get back to where you began, guess what? You've still got a whole night ahead of you. Yes, because as long as you don't cross the date line. So if you start like, you know, right on the date line, but ever so slightly to the west of it, and you only travel west, you have 24 hours to get back to that same point and it still be the turn between night and day. But then you can wait there not cross the date line all of night time. So if you've got, you know, far north enough where you have sort of 16 hours of night time, then you've got 24 hours plus 16. You've got 40 hours. Wow. So as you start at sort of 4pm, I mean, you're going to struggle to sneak down people's chimneys without being spotted if you're doing it at 4pm. But in theory, you know, you can use the night to your advantage. One of the big counter arguments about the tober super eruption, the kind of catastrophe that supposedly shrunk the human population is that when you look back in the genetic record of people, you don't see this population collapse quite at the same moment as we know that the volcanic eruption happened because that ash it left a mark in the geological record. You can see exactly how far and we see dust all the way over to East Africa, right? So it's kind of enormous spread from Indonesia to East Africa. But what you can do is you can take people from around the world and you can look in their genes and you can basically ask us other question, if I walk backwards in time, how far do I have to go before two randomly selected people have a common ancestor before their genes demonstrate that they have a common ancestor? And by doing that and doing that repeatedly with people all across the earth and then looking backwards and backwards and backwards further in time, you can see that there were definitely moments where the population of humans really shrunk, not as much as leopards, by the way. Do you know this about leopards? No, what happened to leopards and whims? Less is like the best example of population bottlenecks. Leopards are so genetically similar to one another that you can take a skin graft from any leper you like and pop it onto another leopards and it will not be rejected. Do we know when this bottleneck happened? Yes, we do. And we know how small the population got as well. Just on that point though, the idea that a leopard can't change its spots turns out not to be true. You can just borrow them from another leopard. We know it was about 10,000 years ago, you can tell this in the genes, and they reckon that something happened that meant the population of leopards went down to about seven. Seven? Right, there are seven common ancestors around about that among all leopards and it's only 10,000 years ago that happened. Now in humans, you can do the same thing. You can see there's these moments of decline, but there isn't one that directly lines up with the moment that the topa, super explosion, super, super erupting. Yeah, and that's disappointing for our quest today. It is. Also, when did these human bottlenecks potentially happen? There are plenty. There are plenty over, I mean hundreds of thousands of years, right? If you're going back 300,000, half a million years ago, then you might be looking at populations that are much more manageable in terms of as far as Santa is concerned. Great. However, I think we're now entering the territory where we need to define what we mean by person. Because if you go back 500,000 years, I don't think there are any homo sapiens. There are, there's homo erectus. But as far as we know, and we're getting into really speculative territory here, homo sapiens with the anatomical features that we have today, you and I, and everyone listening. That didn't emerge until like 300 to 200,000 years ago. And this specifically is big brain, small jaw, upright. Yeah, the brain is like above the eyes, not just right behind it, like a very, very small skeleton. In fact, I love this theory that human intellectual abilities came about because we evolved such slight, dainty skeletons that cooperating together was our best bet that we needed to plan ahead and assign roles and invent rules and morality because we couldn't just go out there, grab an animal and kill it on our own. We didn't have claws, we didn't have big teeth. So we had to design tools and work together. Because these are the two things that set us apart from any other species is that we're cognitive and we're social. That's right. Yeah. Okay, so 300,000 years ago we were talking. But even then, I think that the population of homo sapiens then was like, we're still talking pretty small. Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands. I know. And here's another problem. When we look at the evidence we have, like the oldest homo sapien fossils ever found. That's not like, oh, guess what, guys? All the humans alive on Earth used to live in this like one cave. They spread, like spreading out was just like their thing. We've got ancient, ancient oldest homo sapien fossils found in Ethiopia and Morocco. And you cannot travel that distance on a reindeer in a night. I've got a few options. There's, of course, there's elephant birds. These, you would find these in Managasca. They're far away from the cradle of humanity. Are they extinct now? They are extinct now. They were 10 feet tall. They 200 kilograms. They were around until about a thousand years ago. So couldn't fly technically. But still, they're elephant birds. I mean, what more do you want? They're big enough you could ride them. You could definitely. I guess they were probably pretty fast. Okay. So you had means of transportation to like go quite a distance. You could. I mean, there's also, there's the giant ground sloth. That's another option. It was around 10,000 years ago. Where do they live? You find them in North and South America. So quite far away. But I think we should allow this prehistoric non-magical human to like travel, bring a giant sloth over to where the actual homo sapiens are. They can prepare. Well, we're bending the rules, if it's so slightly here. Yes. Well, on that note, should they for a break? This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. Radio therapy is over a century old, but it is still changing. Cancer Research UK helped lay the foundations of radiotherapy in the early 20th century and has driven progress ever since. Radio therapy remains one of the cornerstones of cancer treatment today. Every year, millions of people worldwide benefit from cancer research UK's work to make it more precise. Scientists are still refining how radiotherapy is delivered. And one example is an experimental treatment called flash radiotherapy, which delivers radiation in fractions of a second up to a thousand times faster than standard radiotherapy. And early studies suggest that speed could make a real difference. Flash radiotherapy may cause up to 50% less damage to healthy cells. But scientists don't yet know why healthy cells seem to be spared. So cancer research UK are working to answer that. Understanding it could be key to reducing side effects in the future. 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We don't know enough about human evolution to say that there weren't some, I don't know, some human ancestors that had already migrated into Asia and then they evolved cognitively and anatomically in the same way, thousands of miles away from those in Africa. We just don't know. Look, don't caveat this. What are you doing? I'm caviating because there are so many theories and there's so many unknowns and I think it's actually really exciting that we still have these questions to answer. Ultimately, I just love knowing that it may have never been possible to visit everyone in one night. I'm still stuck on how geographically spread out they were because I think if you're talking hunter-gatherer situations here, you're probably talking about family pods of 10 to 20 that will probably have their own territory sort of geographically distinct from one another. I think even if you are on an elephant bird or a giant sloth or whatever it might be, I think getting around all of them also actually, early humans, homo sapiens, homo erectus, whatever it might be, were nomadic. You couldn't even have a map of where they were and be able to go and find them in the same place. These people were moving around all of the time. I think you would have found people even in the earliest days spread out across the entire continent of Africa. I think you're probably right. I don't think that again, it's not like a couple chimpanzees gave birth to a homo sapien and they were like, what? And then you were like, oh, cool. I've only got one gift to give out tonight. We're talking about like ape species like homo-hidlebergensis and homo-rodiziensis who slowly became more anatomically like modern humans and they didn't necessarily do it all in the same city, all in the same camp. There's also Neanderthals that feed into this. I mean, Neanderthals are sort of in the middle east at this point while homo sapiens are in Africa. Every human has about 2% of Neanderthal DNA, but only if you have non-African ancestry. And it occurs, the Neanderthals were in Europe, they were in the middle east and as homo sapiens came up through Africa and then sort of went off to the rest of the world. That's where they interacted with Neanderthals. Neanderthals didn't go down into Africa. For this to work, for a person to visit every homo sapien, they've got to do it before homo sapiens leave, leave before they're in Eurasia or beyond because you just can't cover that distance in a night. They reckon there wasn't very many who left, you know. In fact, if you take someone from China, from modern China and you take someone from, I don't know, Europe, South America, basically anywhere else in the world, take two people from around the world, not Africa and compare their genetic codes. They will be more similar than if you take two random people from Africa and do the same thing. Wow. There's a small number of homo sapiens left and all the rest of us are descended from that small number, whereas in Africa where humanity started, where homo sapiens came to be, there are so many distinct pockets of genetic groups that there is so much more variation within Africa than without it. That's incredible. So maybe, maybe you could just be Santa standing at the sort of edge of Africa through the Middle East, being like handing people out their legos they go past. Maybe that's what happened. Maybe that's why they all left. They were like, guys, someone's giving out free pinches of red ochre. We just got to go up north. Free beads. Should we talk about the types of gifts that actually would have been handed out in 275,000 pieces? Well, yeah, I mean, I've said like, I kept thinking that it's going to be like a bead. It needs to be something small because you got to carry around a lot of them. Yeah. I think there is quite a lot of evidence that beads were given as gifts like a very long time ago, maybe not quite 275,000 years ago, but definitely far back in time because for a really long time, we sort of thought that symbolic art started in Europe with sort of 40,000 years ago's the earliest evidence of kind of cave paintings, that sort of thing. But actually, there is a discovery that was made in Bismune cave in Morocco. This is maybe 140,000, 150,000 years ago. And are these tiny little sea snail shells that have got little holes through them as though they were strung through something, sort of like as a necklace. Basically, they were used as beads. And you can be certain that the shells didn't just wash up there because they were found way too far inland, sort of hundreds of kilometers. And they also showed these microscopic wear patterns around this hole, kind of proving that they've been strung on this cord and they've been jangled together. And the idea is that these were sort of given as status symbols. So they must have been traded because they just had traveled too far distance, must have been traded and gifted. And yeah, the idea is that they would signify whether you were married, whether you were not, you know, your status within the hierarchy, that kind of thing. So that would have made quite a good gift, a beaded necklace. Yeah. And it wouldn't have weighed a lot. So even if there were hundreds of people that you wanted to give them to, you could carry them all on your cheetah or giant ground sloth. Yeah. One of them, I think, another good thing that you could give that would make prehistoric man slash woman extremely happy would be a miniature hand axe. Do you know about the archaeologists that have found these? These are absolutely amazing. So in particular, in Woolvercoat, this is in the UK. Archaeologists have found these axes and they are absolutely tiny. They're like, they're like this big, right? Five to seven centimeters, basically the size of a matchbox. And they are like perfectly made. They're perfectly symmetrical. It's not like they're sort of, you know, were B axes that got shrunk down. They were deliberately made to be that size. And you know, they've been knacked to like this absolute perfect level of precision. They're also totally useless, right? And they should have asked. Completely. I mean, if you're thinking about sort of buttering mammoths and chopping wood, I mean, this thing is not, it's not doing anything at all. So in 1999, there's the, these archaeologists, Marik Kohn and Stephen Mithin and they proposed the sexy hand axe theory. Is this the idea that it was done to show your skill and your ability as a craftsman? Sexy hands. Exactly right. Yeah. Exactly right. And isn't that really what gift giving is all about showing how good you are as a gift ever? Aren't I thoughtful? Aren't I skilled? I didn't buy you a cake. I made you a cake because I'm skilled. It shows your worth and your value. So when are these miniature hand axes from? We're talking a long time ago, like 300,000 years ago, maybe even older. Wow. Okay. So that shows that appreciating gifts is very old. Appreciating skill. What's the best gift that you've ever given, Michael? The gift of life to my daughter. Oh, great answer. Great answer. I've given a lot of bad gifts when I was just dating my now wife. I thought she really liked mechanical pencils. She talked about how she liked them a lot. So I got her like really nice mechanical pencils, right? Like fancy ones and she was not amused. I think that's because you and I are stationary purfs and clearly she is not. Well, yeah, I think she just needed a mechanical pencil to do drawings on patterns. And then I'm sitting here like, oh, yeah, well, what if I got you this special two-stage pencil sharpener and did it at and she's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, I don't like them in that way. Tell you what you could do for your special prehistoric center. Maybe you can't leave out some insides. There's little metal trays that they come in. That's not a thing yet. But alcohol is, alcohol absolutely still is a thing. As far back as 275,000 years ago. And we know this because, well, for one thing, fruit, if it is left to ripen for too long, becomes alcoholic essentially. It just happens, right? It just happens, right? One to four percent ethanol you can find in fruits just as they are left to ripen. And other apes, other monkeys, will happily consume fermented fruit in order to get very drunk. You also get elephants sometimes doing this breaking into breweries. That's something that occasionally happens. Basically, animals love gang drunk. It's a thing. Also, humans, the clue that we have prized alcohol for a very long time is that we are amazingly good at detecting it. We can detect even the slightest little width of something being alcoholic, which, I mean, frankly, at beer radar came from somewhere. Because also the theory, do you know about this, the theory, that actually we ended up going through the agricultural revolution, not because of breads, but actually because of beer. Because of beer. The beer before bread theory. I'll buy that. I mean, it didn't affect all humans, obviously. But those that decided, yeah, you know what, let's be agriculturalists. Maybe they did it for the beer. Because here's the idea is that actually bread, to make bread, it's a lot of faff to make bread, right? You've got to grow the grain, you've got to grind it down, you've got to, you know, bake the, grind yeast, whatever, you've got to, there's a lot of effort. And then what you're left with is not even that calorie dense sort of actually something that you could replace quite easily with something that you, you've foraged or something that you killed. Whereas beer on the other hand, I mean, that sort of feels like it's worth it. Sort of more, you know, you've got your, your social chahezion that comes with it. You've got, it's a safe form of hydration. You, you know, sort of kills all the bacteria in the, in the liquid. There's also one of the clues is that when you look in the archaeology of when domesticated grains, so to speak, when grains, they've clearly been bred in order to be used for agriculture. When they start to appear, they, they start to appear in places like temples, rather than in, in kind of ancient households. So this is the, I mean, it's not completely like you said, right? Something under the sun here is, is very much, we've got lots of question marks all over the place, but it's quite possible that, that people knew how to make beer or beer of some form that you could then give out to your prehistoric centre. Yeah, great, great. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas indeed. And they're drinking my little prehistoric beer being like, who's Christ? And I'm like, ah, you guys, just wait 275,000 years. This law makes sense. Yeah, and you would not believe the conversation we have about you in 277,000 years ago. Yeah. Hannah, this was a lot more difficult than I thought and a lot less clear. I just think that we don't have enough evidence to know if homo sapiens were ever concentrated in a small enough place to all be visited in one night. I just don't think they were. I just don't think they were. I'm going with no. I'm going with it's not possible. I know. I mean, if they were, it would have been like two to 300,000 years ago. And then you could have played out your little Santa fantasy for real without needing any kind of magic or any kind of cheats, but gosh, that's kind of what makes the whole story of Santa so special. Yeah, I mean, you've basically got two options. One is, don't worry about geography at all, just deliver a gift voucher by email to all 8 billion people simultaneously. That is available to you. You can do it now. Just get everyone's email address. Not sure how you do that. Not sure everyone has an email address, whatever details, but you could do it right now or sit back and let the big man himself take over. Yeah. He's the one with the leaky bones. He's the one with all the millennia of experience. And I think we'll leave it to him. Shall we? Cheers. Well, that is all we have time for today on the rest of science. As ever, you can email us the rest of science at gohanger.com or join our newsletter at therestis.com slash science.