How many feet per second does Santa travel on Christmas Eve?

Answer 1

There are about 2 billion children in the world, but assuming an average of 1/3 of all those children are on the "Naughty List", we have 600 million children to visit. We can assume that most of these children are concentrated in North and South America and Europe, with an average of 2 children per household. Calculating the distance between every house in each city in these continents, we can estimate about 150,000 miles.

Now, Santa must travel through a 15 ft chimney in 300 million homes, which totals up to 4.5 billion feet or about 852000 miles.

Christmas Eve lasts for 31 hours including the changes in time zones.

Santa must travel 1,002,000 miles in 31 hours, which is 32,322 miles per hour, or 170 million ft per hour. There are 3600 seconds in an hour, so Santa must travel at 42,222 feet per second.

Keep in mind that this is a conservative estimate.