Fold a piece of paper 42 times, it will be 400.000 km thick (248.000 miles) - And reach the moon!

If you fold a piece of paper 42 times, it will be so thick that it will reach all the way from the earth to the moon. I find this kind of stuff super interesting.

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The script for this video:

Did you know that if you fold a piece of paper 42 times it will get so thick that it will reach all the way from the earth to the moon? I know, it sounds crazy and it might be hard to believe, but it is true, and also super interesting, so lets talk about it!

The first thing I did when I heard this fun fact was to do the calculation. I had to find out if this was true or not.

The first step was to find out how thick a piece of paper is, so I headed to my friend Google. There I found out that a piece of paper is about 0.1 milimeter or 0.01 centimetre.

After that I found out that the distance from the earth to the moon is about 348.000km (348.400km).

Now I was ready to do the calculation.

Every time I fold a piece of paper it doubles, and I am going to double it 42 times. So the math became 0.01cm * 2, and we are going to do that 42 times.

When we add this up we end up with, yeah, this number. So we have to convert it km. So now we end up with about 440.000km (439.804km).

As you can tell, this is more than the 348.000km distance to the moon.

But it is still kind of strange that a piece of paper that is folded only 42 times will be over 400.000km thick.

This is what we call the snowball effect, or what Albert Einstein described as the 8th wonder of the world.

I find the snowball effect one of the most interesting things I know. It truly make wonders happen.

The one person who has taken the most financial advantage of the snowball effect is Warren Buffet, one of the richest people on the planet for about 20 years now.

Buffet is an investor, and he makes an average 17% return each year. So if he invested 100.000 dollars, he will have 117.000 dollars the next year, which is not groundbreaking at all. But the magic happens when he does this for a long time, say 60 years. If he only invested 100.000 dollars once, and get the 17% return each year, he will have more than a billion dollars.

All from just a one time investment with a 17% yearly return.

Also if you place just one dollar on a chess table, and double it on every square, you will end up as the richest person in history - by far.

And that is it for this video, but before you go ahead to get to the moon by folding paper, pleace remember that you can not fold a piece of paper more than 7 times.