**Before you read the script:
This is a script and video I had previously created (it is math/science related), and I was looking for thoughtful Nerdfighter feedback so I can become a better creator. I didn't know if this workshop was only for SciShow scripts or if this was to generally critique content to have impove creators. If anyone else wants feedback on science/math videos, please leave a link in the comments and I'd love to check out your script/channel. Thank you. **
How do you get to the moon if you don’t have a fleet of minions
Or a stack of pennies to build or buy a real Saturn V?
Just get a piece of paper or anything foldable.
And for those who have seen this trick before, stick around because I’m expanding on it (pun intended).
How many times do you think we have to fold a piece of paper to get to the moon?
Of course we are putting aside the fact that it is very difficult to fold items more than a few times. If I had a NASA hanger, steam roller, and forklift I would walk you through folding a football sized piece of paper, but I don’t so you’ll have to watch the Mythbusters struggling to fold their sheet 11 times.
And if I had a lifetime supply of toilet paper maybe I would show you how quickly 13 folds adds up.
How is toilet paper so tall after only 13 folds? Well, every time we fold something, it doubles in height creating exponential growth.
Let’s look at a standard sheet of paper that is about .09 mm thick
By 15 folds of this paper would exceed the height of me
By 20 fold it would be taller than lady liberty.
24 folds is higher than the world’s tallest building.
By 30 folds we will be 2 miles short the Karam Line where we would earn our Astronaut wings.
Only two folds more and we are at the airlock of the international space station, which seems pretty high but at 230 miles we are still only about .09% of the way to the moon. We still have over 230 thousand more miles to go.
But since folding is exponential growth, we’ll reach the moon in no time. By Fold 42 our height exceeds 245,000 miles, just further than the moon!
By folding a piece of paper only 42 times we can reach the moon.
With every fold the width of the paper decrease. How tiny would it be by the time we get to the moon? I mean this is already pretty small to stand and climb on.
Is there even enough material in a sheet of paper to get us to the moon? If we broke it up smaller and smaller? What if we even stacked atoms on ends?
We are going to have to do some math. But I learned from my astrophysics teacher that understanding concepts can be more important than exact math. He said we were doing math among friends and pi was a number between 1 and 10.”
Let’s assume that the paper is just made of carbon. What do we know about the piece of paper? What do we know about carbon? We are looking for distance so knowing the dimensions of the paper and carbon is probably useful. But how do we figure out how many carbon atoms are in the piece of paper? The periodic table also tells us carbon’s weight and from the stock of the paper we can figure out its weight.
To solve this problem we have to figure out what we are looking for.
We need to know the distance the piece of paper would cover if individual atoms were stacked on top of each other.
We need to calculate how many atoms there are to stack. For simplicity, let’s assume the paper is made of just carbon.
We will also need to look up the diameter of a carbon atom.
To determine how many atoms are in the paper we can take the weight of the paper, which is about 4 grams, and divide the weight of an atom.
Unfortunately my scale cannot weight individual atoms. So we will have to turn to the periodic table.
The little number at the bottom is the weight of carbon in atomic mass units. 1 AMU is about 1.66X10-24 grams. Since carbon is 12 AMUs, then it weighs about 2X10-23 grams.
We divide the weight of the paper by the weight of an individual atom and we get 2 times 10 to the 23 atoms, which is a pretty big number.
Next we will look at how wide a carbon atom is. It’s radius is about 7 times 10 to the negative 11 meters doubling gets us a diameter of 1.4 times 10 to the negative 10 meters.
If we multiply the number of atoms in a piece of paper by the diameter of carbon, we can see how far they stretch.
A single piece of paper can extend out 2.8 times 10 to the 13 meters.
The moon is only 3 times 10 to the 8 meters away.
This means one piece of paper could go to the moon and back over 36,000 times.
So could the fault in our stars reach the stars?
Just like before, we divide the weight of the book by the weight of carbon to get the number of atoms in the book. Then we multiply this by the diameter of carbon to get 3 times ten to the 15 meters. Hazel and Gus won’t even get us to the edge of the solar system much less to the nearest star, but they will get us past Pluto.
One last question, how far could a human stretch?
If the average human is 70,000 grams and we are made of about 6.71 times 10 to the 27 atoms we would reach about 5.32 times 10 to the 17 meters, which is well past the nearest star.
To put this in perspective, our atoms stacked up would take more than 56 years for light to go from one side of us to the other.
That is a lot of stuff packed into a single person. I kind of feel like I should go to the gym and shed a light year or two.
If you want to play around with this some more and see how far the Harry Potter books can get you or if all the people in the world could stretch to the farthest know object, which by the way we can reach in only 101 folds of a piece of paper, then download the Excel link in the description.
You just choose the composition of the object and it will figure out the rest. Leave comments about anything really cool that you figure out.
We are making a video about Planet Hunters, and we are trying to build version 2 of our coke and mentos cannon and we will have some experiments to go along with that. Another video will be about making music and playing video games using fruit, vegetables, condiments, and punching bags.
Hope you have fun exploring with us.
**That was the orginal script. If you watch the video you'll see it changed some. Thanks for reading. Have a wonderful day!**
