Fold Paper to the Moon
A sheet of paper is a tenth of a millimetre thick — but every fold doubles it. Watch a folded-paper tower rocket past you, a house, the Burj Khalifa and the edge of space, until 42 folds reach the Moon. That's exponential growth.
What you'll learn
- Exponential Growth
- Doubling
- Powers of Two
- Scale
- Orders of Magnitude
In this video
How many times would you fold a sheet of paper to reach the Moon? Take a guess.
Here's the one rule that changes everything. Every single fold doubles the paper's thickness. It starts painfully slow.
But watch what doubling does. Seven folds, and you've got a deck of cards. Ten folds, a paperback book. Fourteen, as tall as you.
Seventeen folds, a house. And at twenty-three folds, you've passed the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building on Earth.
Thirty folds reaches the edge of space. Thirty-six carries you out past the satellites.
And at just forty-two folds, your paper tower touches the Moon.
The catch? Try it yourself, and your hands give up around seven folds. The world record is only thirteen.
This is the power of exponential growth. Doubling feels slow, slow, slow, and then it explodes.
Topics
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