Exponential Power
Mean distance from the Earth is about 384,000 km, or about 3.84 x 1012 pages away. I start with an unfolded page (zero foldings), it's one page thick. When I fold a page once, it will be 2 pages thick. But -- and this is key -- when I fold it twice on itself, it's not three, but 4 pages thick.
I start with an unfolded page (zero foldings), it's one page thick. When I fold a page once, it will be 2 pages thick. But -- and this is key -- when I fold it twice on itself, it's not three, but 4 pages thick.
Can you see a pattern here? Paper folding is exponential, so that if I fold it a fourth time, it'll be 16 pages thick (so that option is clearly wrong), a fifth time will give me 32 pages thick, and so on. By time I get to 9 folding's, my folded paper is bigger than my original ream of 500 sheets. By time I get to 20 folding's, my folded paper is more than 10 kilometers high, which surpasses Mt. Everest.
41 folding's will get me slightly more than halfway to the Moon, so that means that 42 foldings is all it takes! (Of course, good luck folding a real piece of paper more than 7 or 8 times...) Pretty incredible, isn't it? But that's the power of an exponential, that it lets you turn small things into huge things by simply compounding what you have over and over again. And incredibly, it only takes 42 foldings of a paper to get from the Earth to the Moon, and only about 94 folding's of a paper to make something the size of the entire visible Universe!
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