How Might Santa Visit 2.3 Billion Homes in One Night?

As scientists, we believe in facts, we’re led by evidence and we only subscribe to theories if there is a solid basis for them.

While we have made massive strides toward understanding the universe and the world we live in, we’re still no closer to solving some big questions like how can Santa Claus visit every child on the planet in one night.

Over the years, many ideas and theories have been put out there to address the numerous challenges facing Santa on Christmas Eve. Searching for answers is difficult. To even establish a working hypothesis would require experts from multiple disciplines to collaborate on a monumental study.

We’d need anthropologists to give us insights into how Santa engages with so many different cultures and languages. Historians would have to build a detailed map of known sightings so that we could begin to understand his annual route. 

Vets and architects would need to figure out what kind of rooftops best suit Reindeer at the locations identified by the historians and archaeologists would have to painstakingly search for clues that he may have left behind. 

This is before you start asking astrophysicists, mathematicians, quantum chemists and algorithmic scientists to start exploring time travel, time dilation, and propulsion systems that we can only dream about.

What we’re describing is a global research project that might only prove what we already know - that Santa exists.

This means, that for many of us, the answer to one question, above all others, will remain elusive - how does Santa visit every child on the planet in a single night?

But for what it's worth, we think that Santa can slow down time. How have we come to this conclusion?

In 2021, it was estimated that there were 2.3 billion houses in the world. To visit each of those homes in a window of 31 hours, which accounts for time zone changes and the rotation of the earth, would be next to impossible.

After all, it would mean that Santa would need to complete each visit in .05 milliseconds. We do like cookies, but scoffing at that pace would do more than cause some indigestion.

You also have to factor in the fact that Santa would need be travel close to the speed of light - 300,000 km/sec - which reindeer, no matter how well motivated by our well-intentioned ambition to supply them with millions of carrots, will struggle to achieve.

There are also some real issues around using carrots as a fuel source - or using carrots to act as a carrot (sorry, that's a really bad Christmas cracker joke) - because reindeer can’t eat carrots.

Yes, that’s right, despite our best intentions and enormous goodwill, reindeer don’t have top teeth, so they can’t physically chew carrots into a digestible size.

Their favourite foods include mosses, herbs, ferns and grasses. They also eat the shoots and leaves of shrubs and trees, especially willow and birch. In winter, they make do with lichen (also called reindeer moss) and fungi, scraping the snow away with their hooves to get it.

Of course, if you can’t find lichen in your local supermarket, they adore nutritious porridge oats.

Santa could use an advanced antimatter propulsion system to propel him around the planet but scientists believe that these futuristic rockets could top out at 72 million miles per hour. 

Apart from having to land the antimatter-powered sleigh at that speed, which might be difficult given that some families tend to leave Santa a small tipple of whiskey instead of milk, he’d need a Cern-style facility to harvest antimatter.

Storing antimatter is another issue. Scientists believe that it could be stored in the form of frozen antihydrogen pellets - which may be possible to achieve at the North Pole - but extracting energy from these pellets would be difficult due to the mass loss that occurs in antimatter annihilation.

All of this brings us back around to the idea of Santa slowing time using what are called relativity clouds. 

Back in 2010, Dr Larry Silverberg from NC State University published research suggesting that Santa could manipulate space and time by creating relativity clouds. 

As Santa builds these clouds to move at high speed, time, as he experiences it, moves slowly. In effect, this means that what is an hour for the rest of us, can be as long as a month for Santa when he travels in a relatively cloud.

Inside the cloud, time and space are different than outside. If you were to sit in his sleigh inside the relativity cloud looking out, everything you could see would be frozen, but when you’re outside the relativity cloud looking in, Santa goes by in a flash. 

This could also explain why people haven’t been able to see Santa on Christmas Eve, or if they do see Santa Claus he appears and disappears quickly.

Relativity clouds would allow Santa to spend as much time as he needed to park his sleigh, clamber down chimneys, neatly place presents beneath trees and enjoy some milk and cookies along the way.

It all means that instead of having only 31 hours to make his way around the world, Santa can distort time to give himself months to make his Christmas Eve deliveries. 

How it all works is still a mystery to us, but we don’t want to get tied up with the science of Santa at this time of year, we much prefer revelling in the wonder and magic of Christmas.

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