A sheet of premium 250–300 grams per square meter matte printing paper is about one-third of a millimeter thick.
It becomes twice as thick when folded in half. If you fold the paper thirty times in half, how tall do you think that stack will be? as much as a car, a phone book, or even a house? The folded stack will really be 358 kilometers tall, which is close to the height of the International Space Station, which is orbiting Earth at a height of 408 kilometers.
Fold the paper ten more times, for a total of forty folds. The resulting stack of folded paper is 366,504 kilometers tall, or nearly the distance from Earth to the Moon (384,400 kilometers).The example above shows how poorly the human brain can understand exponential and even nonlinear functions. Its numerical comprehension is likewise poor. In a Stanford University article titled “Brains are bad at big numbers, making it impossible to grasp what a million COVID-19 deaths really means,” Lindsey Hasak and Elizabeth Y. Toomarian explained how the human brain is designed to compare quantities rather than count. While we can easily recognize quantities of one, two, three, and four, we must stop and count when the quantity exceeds that.
