Paper Bigger Than The Universe?

You Can Make An A4 Sheet Of Paper Stretch Across The Entire Universe

A4 Paper. 300mm x 210mm and 0.05mm thick becomes bigger than the universe?

How could be possible?
Exponential growth.

When you fold a piece of paper you double its thickness each time. At first it may not seem to have much of an effect but by the time you have folded it 8 times, you have if you can get there, you have a blob of paper 1.25 mm long, but 12.8 mm thick. Bending it from here would be just as hard as bending steel. You may also have trouble not exploding the paper.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuG_CeEZV6w

Assuming could get past that point and get past the world record of 12 folds. How big would the paper start getting. Well we double the thickness each time so

10 folds and the paper will be about the width of a hand.
23 folds would get you to one kilometer.
30 folds would get you to space. Your paper will be now 100 kilometers high.
42 folds would get you to the Moon.
51 and you would be feeling kind of hot


81 folds and your paper would be 127,786 light-years thick. Nearly as thick as the Andromeda Galaxy, estimated at 141,000 light-years across.


90 folds would make your paper 130.8 million light-years across. Bigger than the Virgo Supercluster, estimated at 110 million light-years across.
The Virgo Supercluster contains the Local Galactic Group including Andromeda and our own Milky Way and about 100 other galaxy groups.

And lastly with 103 folds, you would be outside of the observable Universe. This roughly has a diameter of 93 billion light-years.

So fold a piece of paper 103 times and you will be able to reach across the universe.

Obviously this is impossible but I thought it was cool to visual how fast exponential growth really is.
This kind of relationship is modeled by the graph below.
If you imagine the x axis as the number of folds you can see that you can't even view values of x at 100 because of the scale.

Thanks for reading and I encourage you to leave comments about your thoughts on the topic, things I haven't covered in this post, how you think I can improve my posts, what you liked about this topic etc..

If you enjoyed this post or any of my others, follow this blog.

Be sure to also share this around with your friends and family.