With the holidays coming up, kids all over the world are excited as ever to receive a gift from Santa Claus. Every year, Santa is tasked with the job of delivering presents to every single child in the world, all in one night. As you could imagine, this feat seems almost impossible. We decided to do the math to find out just what it would take for Santa to deliver presents to every child in the world in one night.

For the purpose of this study, we decided to set some constants to get consistent results and make this process run a little smoother. We decided that Santa Claus would deliver presents to everyone in the world 18 years of age or younger. He would deliver 1 present to each child and each present would weigh 3 pounds. Taking into consideration the varying time zones of the world, we’re giving Santa 24 hours to deliver all the presents.

The first thing we ventured to discover was just how much his bag of presents would weigh. According to world population statistics, there are 1,122,378,109 (1.12 billion) people 18 years old or younger in the world. That means Santa must deliver 1.12 billion presents weighing 3 pounds each. So the big bag of presents Santa carries around on Christmas night starts out weighing 3,367,134,327 (3.37 billion) pounds. That’s quite a heavy bag to pull around. But it isn’t actually Santa Claus pulling the bag, it’s his 9 Reindeer, led by Rudolph. Assuming the sleigh weighs around 1 ton and Santa Claus weighing about 250 pounds (quite generous I would say), the Reindeer would be pulling a total weight of 3,367,136,577 (3.37 billion) pounds. Divided among the Reindeer, each Reindeer would be pulling 374,126,286 (374 million) pounds. Santa not only has the only flying Reindeer known to mankind, but the strongest animals known to mankind.

The next thing we wanted to discover was just how fast these immensely powerful Reindeer were pulling this overwhelmingly heavy sleigh. According to world population statistics there are approximately 5 people per household across the world. Knowing there are 7.47 billion people and 5 people per household we can conclude that there are 1.494 billion households. With only 24 hours to reach every household, Santa must reach 17,291 households per second. With that many households to reach each second, he only has .000058 seconds to park his sleigh, dismount, slide down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, consume the cookies and milk that have been left out for him, climb back up the chimney, get back onto the sleigh, and move on to the next house. Considering Santa’s size, that’s a very impressive feat.

These calculations do give us a good idea of how fast Santa has to distribute the presents, but it doesn’t tell us exactly how fast the sleigh is moving. In order to figure that out, many assumptions must be made. First off, we’ll assume that there are equal amounts of households in each city across the world, and no households anywhere other than these cities. According to world population statistics, there are 4,416 cities. If each city has an equal amount of households, then there are 338,315 households per city. We will also assume all these cities are evenly distributed around the world lying on the Arctic Circle, the Tropic of Cancer, the Equator, the Tropic of Capricorn, and the Antarctic Circle. Keep in mind these assumptions alter the real results, results in which Santa would be traveling much faster. The following table shows how long these lines are and how many cities and households there would be on each line.

Because Santa is starting in the North Pole and has to travel from 1 line to the next, we must also consider the distance between the lines. The distance from the North Pole to the Arctic Circle is 1615 miles. From the Arctic Circle to the Tropic of Cancer is 2963 miles. From the Tropic of Cancer to the Equator is 1553 miles. From the Equator to the Tropic of Capricorn is 1553 miles. And from the Tropic of Capricorn to the Antarctic Circle is 2963. Adding all these distances together, Santa Claus travels a total of 103,216 miles all in one night. With 24 hours to work, just to cover this ground Santa must travel 6306 feet/second or 4300 miles/hour, more than 5 times the speed of sound.

Just what would happen if Santa were able to do this? Because these calculations did not take into consideration acceleration, we’ll say he accelerated to his speed almost instantaneously, so essentially he accelerates to this speed in 1 second and then continues at a constant speed until decelerating back to a stop in 1 second. This means Santa’s acceleration is 6306 feet/second/second. Accelerating this fast means Santa and his Reindeer would be experiencing 197 G’s, or a force 197 times the force of gravity. To put this into perspective, studies by NASA concluded that humans can only withstand 20 G’s for 10 seconds before dying. The same study by NASA concluded that 1 second of exposure to 20 G’s caused the test subjects to go permanently blind as the blood vessels in their eyes exploded, and this is only about 10% the force Santa is experiencing. Also, under this rapid acceleration, Santa’s organs would be slammed around the inside of his body, essentially turning his insides to mush. He would surely have many broken bones from being ripped from his initial still position and traveling at such high speeds would cause his lungs to explode with the first breath he takes. Also, that much mass traveling that fast would create a ridiculous amount of air resistance, comparable to a space shuttle re-entering earth’s atmosphere. Santa, his reindeer, and his sleigh would instantaneously erupt into flames. If a sleigh with this mass were to crash into any of the cities traveling this fast, the city would be wiped from existence with an explosion as powerful as a nuclear bomb. Santa Claus delivering presents on Christmas night is not only the deadliest task imaginable to him and his reindeer, but essentially a threat to mankind as he could wipe out millions of people in much less than a second.

The task Santa is faced with every year is unimaginable and just simply impossible. He and his reindeer would die within the second of starting. But again, this study made many assumptions in analyzing Santa’s yearly task and it’s completely ignoring the idea that Santa Claus most likely has a magical aura surrounding him and his reindeer protecting them from the horrors depicted in this study. Nevertheless, Santa Claus’ annual trip must just be a Christmas miracle. Unless, of course, it has simply been the parents secretly gifting their children the presents, and not Santa delivering them, but everyone knows that’s not the case.