Santa meets Succession in Arthur Christmas

TechFinitive x FlashForward is our exclusive newsletter. Every fortnight, we pick a technology featured in a classic movie and fast forward to where it’s at today. Subscribe to it on Substack so that you’re notified every time a new edition goes out. This edition was originally published on the 22nd of December.

Flashback: This Aardman animated comedy finally reveals how Santa delivers presents to everyone in the world in one night: he doesn’t. Father Christmas is just a figurehead for a high-tech operation involving battalions of elves, state-of-the-art gadgets, a huge globally connected North Pole operations centre and an enormous stealth-equipped spaceship. Operation Santa Claus is coming to town!

Flashforward to today: Arthur Christmas is a must-see for any organisation, as a fly-on-the-wall look inside a legacy enterprise in a time of transition. Basically, it’s Succession with reindeer.

The current CEO/Santa is a clueless figurehead whose staff guide him through the most trivial tasks just to make him feel useful. He has a tendency for gaffes, like getting his head stuck on a Quack Quack Moo Activity Farm Toy in a child’s bedroom, necessitating emergency battery removal. His staff (elves) are trained to leap into crisis management mode at any moment.

The real brains of the operation is Santa’s son Steve Christmas, although he has an MBA where his yuletide spirit should be. Steve is a logistics genius and a cool head in a crisis, but he needs a refresher on the importance of brand purpose.

And the technology? Most impressively, the modern-day corporate Santa has traded his flying reindeer and magic sleigh for a city-sized, high-tech flying vehicle called the S-1. It’s perfect for the enormous logistical challenge of dropping off a present to every kid in the world. 

In the book The Physics of Christmas: From the Aerodynamics of Reindeer to the Thermodynamics of Turkey, Dr Roger Highfield works out the logistics of giving a present to every kid in the world. There are around 2.1 billion people under 18, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund, and if you assume an average of 2.5 kids per household Santa has to travel 220 miles. But Highfield points out that Santa doesn’t just have one night to do it all: from the moment the first time zone ticks over into Christmas Day, Santa can move backwards against the earth’s rotation and give himself nearly 48 hours to sober the entire world.

If Santa were coming to town alone, he’d have a fraction of a millisecond per household. But with a workforce of elves abseiling into every chimney and removing windows, it’s much more doable. 

The S-1 travels at 150,000mph, which is sadly impossible in the Earth’s atmosphere. The record for the world’s fastest aircraft is held by the rocket-powered North American X-15, which hit a top speed of 4,520 miles per hour in October 1967. That’s around Mach 6.7, nearly seven times the speed of sound. Since then, the uncrewed Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2, an experimental military glider, hit Mach 20 in tests (before crashing).

The speed of Santa’s S-1 is more like Mach 195. The only manmade objects capable of that sort of speed are in space. In 2018, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe broke the fastest speed record of all by hurtling towards the sun at 69.72 km/s. That’s about 250,992 km/h or 155,959 mph. According to Guinness World Records, that’s fast enough to get from New York to London in about 1 minute and 20 seconds. No word on how many pairs of socks or lumps of coal it can carry, however.

If you’re wondering how a city-sized sleigh-shaped unidentified flying object escapes detection, it’s because the S-1 has some form of cloaking technology built into the underside. Looking from the ground, you’d only see the stars. There are a couple of real-world possibilities: the S-1 may have some form of optical camouflage, or may use metamaterials.

Optical camouflage basically means having some form of camera behind the hidden object, which plays back the view at the front. Crucially, it can’t just be played back on a screen, because the camouflage effect would only work for someone looking straight at it. Instead, you need a retro-reflective material made from thousands of tiny beads, each of which reflects light back in the direction from which it came. You also need a projector to beam the image onto the surface of the object you want to hide, which means it isn’t a very self-contained system.

Metamaterials, meanwhile, don’t need a camera. Instead, they can bend radio waves and even light waves around an object so the waves can continue on as if the object weren’t there. Combine that with a material discovered in 2018 called broadband achromatic metalens, which focuses light precisely without the rainbow-coloured effects of chromatic aberration, and you might have the makings of a cloaking device.

Will it sell?

In the real world, optical camouflage isn’t yet a viable system for Harry Potter-esque invisibility cloaks or camouflage for Santa-themed spyplanes. But it could be used for real-life situations where you need to deal with an obstructed view. For example, imagine if you could make the sides of your car transparent. You’d be able to see obstacles behind you while reversing or tell exactly how close you are to that curb. This would be especially useful for aircraft pilots looking ‘through’ the floor of their cockpit as they land.

Fun fact

Steve Claus may have hacked missile technology to build the HOHO and the S-1, but in the real world, Santa can’t evade all-seeing military surveillance. Every year, the US and Canada’s missile-tracking early warning system NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) pretends to monitor Santa’s sleigh on its Christmas Eve flight.

It all began when the US Air Force claimed to have detected a flying sleigh and reindeer on Christmas Eve, 1948. The story goes that in 1955 a child misdialled a Santa hotline phone number from an advert and reached the desk of one Colonel Harry Shoup at Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD). A hotline was then established for kids to ring in and find out where Santa was at that point. In recent years, millions of people have followed Santa’s progress on Google Earth and Bing Maps.

The Kris Kringle Award for misuse of technology

Every elf is equipped with a HOHO 3000, the sort of do-everything tablet any gadget fan would love to find in their stocking. The HOHO features “state-of-the-art EMF sensor technology hacked directly from the military’s missile technology” and can pick locks, all of which sound very dubious. Even more dubious is a naughty/nice scanner. Either someone’s niceness or naughtiness is encoded in their DNA, which is a bleak prospect, or the device cross-references data points like school records and the number of times a parent has had to go and scream into a pillow. 

Verdict

Arthur Christmas is a refreshingly modern festive family movie from the playful minds of Aardman. It’s also a useful reminder of how large organisations make operational mistakes when they lose sight of their purpose and forget to put the customer first if that’s your idea of a good time. Merry Christmas! 

Ho-ho-ho! Merry links!

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