What if Santa was real?: A physiological and Biological perspective on Santa.

There have been some excellent hypotheses for What if Santa was real?, A challenge by @suesa; Challenge link. At first, I thought I would not be able to answer it Since I have very little Idea on the historical/religious perspective of Santa Claus. I know that he lives in the North pole; The Finns have a village dedicated to him in Laplands. I know he is cute hairy and chubby; So are several bears. And I know he works super fast.

On a quick google search, I read that he had to travel several times faster than the speed of sound to deliver gifts throughout Earth in a 32 hour time window. Physics says it is near impossible for him to be human because the amount of stress and pressure would make him a pulp and mess.

But, Bear with me. I have a theory that is funny but hey all theories are some one's mad ideas at a point of time.

Introducing: Tardi-clauses !!!!

Santa may be a water bear or also known as Tardigrades. They are segmented micro-animals omnipresent in earth's ecosystems. These animals are the only known living creatures to be able to survive space, radiation, extreme conditions.

They are cute, hairy and chubby little beings (like Santa). Their impressive feats include;

• Withstand extremely cold temperatures close to absolute zero; ahem arctic is quite warm in comparison.
• Canwithstandd high pressures; It is said upto 6x more pressure tolerance than whats found in the ​marinara trench.
• Can survive ionizing radiations maybe any environment with enough moisture.
• They feed on moss, algae and plant cells.
• They are some extremely durable creatures and could suspend their metabolism.
• They are the first known animals to survive low earth orbit; where they were exposed to vacuum. Check FOTON-M3 and BIOPAN for more info.

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Santa is a higher genetically modified tardigrade. For santa to be able to travel at speeds exceeding several times the speed of sound; he has to be able to survive the pressure and G-forces associated with it. Tardigrades if genetically altered could withstand higher pressures than most organisms. This makes for interesting candidate for a santa organism. The organism could have a combination of selected features like resistance against deformation at high pressure, Ablility to function efficiently even if there is no food during 'delivery time' etc., There has been an experiment on nature communications where, Researchers have introduced a tardigrade protein to human cells and improved radio tolerance. Source: Takuma Hashimoto et al., So it is not impossible to alter genomes and get a tardi-claus.

Since we know that tardigrades can survive in extreme cold conditions; It is likely that the tardi-claus loves sub-zero temperatures and thrives in the environment. A recent paper by Boothby TC et al., shows how their subset of proteins alter under desiccation. I guess they will soon identify proteins for cold tolerance also.Maybe tardi-claus knows that like facebook and google he needs huge computation power to spy on the world's children. And free aircon in the north pole is much welcome.

Maybe Tardi-claus has a huge network to deliver gifts, I liked the drone swarm idea. I was thinking it might be possible for a higher order intelligent tardi-claus to swarm​ altogether (PS: the original author @mobbs post is so cool! Check that out first! ).

I am just proposing that Santa​ like organism is not impossible to create from existing 'animals' it is going to take a lot of R&D. The question of ethics and the value of creating such is always up to debate.

Cute pink tardigrade. Almost Santa like

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PS:

Things to note; There is mention of tardigrade in star trek that travels through time and space using 'mycelial network'. That would be a cool idea to think that Tardi-Claus can access parallel universes, bending time as it desires to. But that would not entirely be an​ original idea. It was interesting to share it though.