It reaches past the Sun
What If You Folded Paper Fifty Times?
Fifty folds of ordinary paper would be thicker than the distance to the Sun.
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Step 1 of 5
The doubling starts out looking harmless.
The first ten folds are boring. That is what makes the rest surprising. A sheet of printer paper is about a tenth of a millimetre thick. Fold it and it is two tenths. Fold it again, four. After ten folds you have about a centimetre — a thin book, and nothing to write home about.
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Step 2 of 5
Then it stops being paper-shaped.
At twenty folds it is a hundred metres — taller than most buildings. At thirty it is over a hundred kilometres, which is higher than the edge of space. At forty it is past the point where satellites orbit.
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Step 3 of 5
Forty-two folds reaches the Moon.
The Moon is 384,400 kilometres away. Forty-two doublings of a tenth of a millimetre is about 440,000 kilometres. Forty-two times — fewer folds than most people can count on their fingers twice.
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Step 4 of 5
Fifty folds goes past the Sun.
One more fold, and you are past it. Fifty doublings gives roughly 113 million kilometres. The Sun is about 150 million away, so fifty folds gets three quarters of the way there — and fifty-one folds overshoots it entirely.
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Step 5 of 5
Why you cannot actually do it: you run out of paper, not strength.
The record is twelve, set by a schoolgirl who began with 1.2 km of toilet roll. Every fold needs a rounded edge, and that edge eats length — and the length it eats doubles too. By the seventh fold on an ordinary sheet there is simply no flat paper left to bend. People have beaten it, but only by starting with paper the length of a corridor.
The record is twelve folds, set by a student using a kilometre and a half of toilet paper along a school corridor.
The short version
Fifty folds of ordinary paper would reach three quarters of the way to the Sun — and you cannot do it because you run out of length, not muscle.
Try it yourself
Fold any sheet as many times as you can. You will stop at six or seven, and it will be because there is nothing left to fold, not because it is stiff.