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)