and can see everything that's going on,

all at once.

He has super-strength,

and can even shapeshift.

We're not talking about a superhero.

Instead, we're talking about Santa Claus.

And now, you're him!

Don't worry,

in What If anyone can be Santa.

Now, It's your job to deliver

presents around the world to billions of people,

all within a single night.

So, you've made your list and checked it twice.

Now you're ready to deliver

presents to the entire world.

But your work wouldn't start on Christmas Eve.

You'd be working a lot longer than that

to produce all these gifts.

Sure, not everyone celebrates Christmas,

but let's assume that every kid on Earth

will get a gift this year,

just to make this more fun.

How much would something

like this cost anyway?

If we assume that

every kid gets something,

even a lump of coal,

if they were bad,

that would over 1.9 billion children

you'd be delivering gifts to.

Luckily, you would have your

elves on staff to help you make all the gifts.

You could put them to work mining the coal, too.

Instead of building all these gifts from scratch,

your elves would probably act

more like an Amazon fulfillment center of some kind.

We know from Amazon's numbers that

they have 175 fulfillment centers,

employing about a quarter-million people.

During the holiday season of 2016,

they sent out over 1 billion packages.

We can expect our staff numbers to increase

by hundreds of thousands of elves

if we want to send out almost 2 billion gifts.

And if each gift costs about $75,

the cost of our presents would be nearly $143 billion.

The expenses wouldn't end with that, either.

You'd have to have a tricked out sleigh

to deliver all these gifts.

The most important thing you'd need

would be a heat shield.

Traveling at the high speeds

necessary to make this work,

you'd be encountering friction in the atmosphere

similar to meteors crashing down to Earth.

It's safe to say that without a heat shield,

you'll barely make it to the first set of houses.

So, assuming you've figured out a way to survive all this,

what else would the sleigh need?

Well, it would need to be incredibly big.

If each gift weighs about 1 kg (2.2 lbs),

the presents on your sleigh

would weigh nearly 2 billion kgs (4.4 billion lbs).

And how would you be able to move this massive cargo?

Well, by magical flying reindeer, of course!

I mean, we could strap some rockets onto our sleigh,

but come on, it's Christmas.

Don't be a grinch.

Unfortunately, you wouldn't

get to know every reindeer's name, like

Rudolph

or Dasher

or Dancer

or Prancer

or Vixen.

That's because,

to move all these gifts,

you'll need a ton more reindeer.

If a single reindeer

can haul about 140 kg (309 lbs),

then you'll need more than 14 million

reindeer to move your sleigh.

So this entire contraption,

with reindeer included,

would weigh over 4 billion kg (8.8 billion lbs).

Let's hope the reindeer and the sleigh

can constantly float,

because landing on a roof,

is pretty much gonna crush it.

Okay, now that you're ready for your trip,

how fast would you need to travel?

Well, assuming my math is right,

you'd need to move 13,000

times faster than the speed of sound

and deliver to 5,600 homes every second.

That's .2 milliseconds to

park your sleigh,

grab the gifts,

get into the house,

set down the presents,

grab a cookie,

oh right, I forgot about the cookies.

If you want to be a good and polite Santa,

you're going to need to do a lot of eating.

Since it's customary for people to leave some sort of snack

for Santa to eat during all this hard work,

you're going to need to eat

over 600 million food items.

This will range anywhere from mince pies in Scotland,

to good old fashioned cookies and milk

in North America.

Yeah this may sound fantastic at first,

but you'll quickly realize how

big a task you have in front of you.

If each home has,

150 calories worth of food for you to eat,

by the end of the night,

you'll have consumed over 93 billion calories.

Or as I call it, Friday.

For reference, in your entire lifetime,

you'll be lucky to consume 100 million calories.

But you'll undoubtedly be burning off

quite a few of these calories as you go throughout the night.

Even the act of chewing and digesting

this much food would burn at least

10% of them.

And sure,

you might be tired by the end of all this,

but think of what you've just done!

You've made billions of kids happy, all around the world.

Now you can rest,

and get ready to do it all over again next year.

This sure would be a lot easier if we could

travel through time.

But we'll leave that story for another WHAT IF.