1mm paper folded 50 times how much distance it covered?
Answers
Well, as other answers have explained, the maths is pretty straightforward. If you mean how do you explain that it seems hard to believe or counter-intuitive, that’s because humans do very poorly at picturing and imagining exponential things.
If you want another nice example of exponential growth, the “wheat on a chessboard” problem is an old one. The story goes something along the lines of a philosopher asking payment from a ruler for inventing chess; he requests the king place a grain of wheat/rice on the first square of a chessboard, then twice as many grains on each subsequent square. Given humans’ inability to handle exponential shenanigans, that doesn’t sound like much, and the ruler scoffs at his modest request. But if you run the numbers, by the time you get to square 64, you’re going to be packing enough grain to consume the entire world’s modern production level for centuries. All based off the squares of a single chessboard.