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What If Santa Claus Actually Existed?
WHAT IF
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2 years ago
He travels the world in a single day, and can see everything that's going on, all at once. He has super strength, and can even shapeshift.
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00:00
He travels the world in a single day
00:03
and can see everything that's going on
00:05
all at once.
00:06
He has super strength
00:08
and can even shapeshift.
00:11
We're not talking about a superhero.
00:14
Instead, we're talking about Santa Claus.
00:18
And now, you're him.
00:21
Don't worry, in What If,
00:23
anyone can be Santa.
00:25
Now, it's your job to deliver presents
00:28
around the world to billions of people,
00:31
all within a single night.
00:33
So you've made your list and checked it twice.
00:52
Now, you're ready to deliver presents
00:55
to the entire world.
00:56
But your work wouldn't start on Christmas Eve.
01:00
You'd be working a lot longer than that
01:02
to produce all these gifts.
01:04
Sure, not everyone celebrates Christmas,
01:07
but let's assume that every kid on Earth
01:09
will get a gift this year,
01:11
just to make this more fun.
01:13
So how much would something like this cost anyway?
01:17
If we assume that every kid gets something,
01:20
even a lump of coal if they were bad,
01:23
that would be over 1.9 billion children
01:26
you'd be delivering gifts to.
01:29
Luckily, you would have your elves on staff
01:31
to help you make all the gifts.
01:33
You could put them to work mining the coal too.
01:36
Instead of building all these gifts from scratch,
01:39
your elves would probably act
01:41
more like an Amazon fulfillment center of some kind.
01:44
We know from Amazon's numbers that
01:46
they have 175 fulfillment centers
01:49
employing about a quarter million people.
01:52
During the holiday season of 2016,
01:54
they sent out over 1 billion packages.
01:58
We can expect our staff numbers to increase
02:00
by hundreds of thousands of elves
02:02
if we want to send out almost 2 billion gifts.
02:05
And if each gift costs about $75,
02:08
the cost of our presents would be nearly $143 billion.
02:13
The expenses wouldn't end with that either.
02:16
You'd have to have a tricked-out sleigh
02:18
to deliver all these gifts.
02:20
The most important thing you'd need
02:22
would be a heat shield.
02:24
Traveling at the high speeds necessary to make this work,
02:27
you'd be encountering friction in the atmosphere
02:29
similar to meteors crashing down to Earth.
02:32
It's safe to say that without a heat shield,
02:35
you'd barely make it to the first set of houses.
02:38
So assuming you've figured out a way to survive all this,
02:41
what else would the sleigh need?
02:43
Well, it would need to be incredibly big.
02:46
If each gift weighs about 1 kg,
02:49
the presents on your sleigh
02:51
would weigh nearly 2 billion kg.
02:53
And how would you be able to move this massive cargo?
02:57
Well, by flying magical reindeer, of course.
03:00
I mean, we could strap some rockets onto our sleigh,
03:03
but come on, it's Christmas, don't be a Grinch.
03:06
Unfortunately, you wouldn't get to know every reindeer's name
03:10
like Rudolph, or Dasher, or Dancer, or Prancer, or Vixen.
03:13
That's because to move all these gifts,
03:16
you'll need a ton more reindeer.
03:19
If a single reindeer can haul about 140 kg,
03:23
then you'll need more than 14 million reindeer to move your sleigh.
03:27
So this entire contraption, with reindeer included,
03:30
would weigh over 4 billion kg.
03:33
Let's hope the reindeer and the sleigh can constantly float,
03:37
because landing on a roof is pretty much going to crush it.
03:40
Now that you're ready for your trip,
03:43
how fast would you need to travel?
03:46
Well, assuming my math is right,
03:48
you'd need to move 13,000 times faster than the speed of sound,
03:53
and deliver to 5,600 homes every second.
03:56
That's 0.2 milliseconds to park your sleigh,
03:59
grab the gifts, get into the house, set down the presents,
04:01
grab a cookie.
04:03
Oh, right, I forgot about the cookies.
04:05
If you want to be a good and polite Santa,
04:07
you're going to need to do a lot of eating.
04:09
Since it's customary for people to leave some sort of snack
04:13
for Santa to eat during all this hard work,
04:15
you're going to need to eat over 600 million food items.
04:19
This will range anywhere from mince pies in Scotland
04:22
to good old-fashioned cookies and milk in North America.
04:26
Yeah, this may sound fantastic at first,
04:28
but you'll quickly realize how big a task you have in front of you.
04:32
If each home has 150 calories worth of food for you to eat,
04:37
by the end of the night,
04:39
you'll have consumed over 93 billion calories.
04:42
Or as I call it, Friday.
04:44
(laughter)
04:46
For reference, in your entire lifetime,
04:49
you'll be lucky to consume 100 million calories.
04:53
But you'll undoubtedly be burning off
04:55
quite a few of these calories as you go throughout the night.
04:58
Even the act of chewing and digesting this much food
05:01
would burn at least 10% of them.
05:03
And sure, you might be tired by the end of all this,
05:06
but think of what you've just done.
05:09
You've made billions of kids happy all around the world.
05:13
Now you can rest,
05:14
and get ready to do it all over again next year.
05:17
This sure would be a whole lot easier if we could travel through time.
05:22
But we'll leave that story for another WHAT IF.
05:26
(upbeat music)
05:29
(upbeat music)
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