When I was 6 or 7, I read an article in Highlights Magazine that said something like "If you double a penny for a month, you will have over a million dollars." Naturally, I went and asked my mom for a penny so I could double it until I had a million dollars. She struggled to explain to me that it wouldn't just work like that; that I had to work to earn money. I'm sure it was hard to explain, as she probably didn't understand much more about exponential functions than I did.
Similar in nature to the magazine article, Mark Zuckerberg once said that if you fold a piece of paper 50 times, it will reach the moon. Although that was a vast understatement, it is the right idea. Fold a piece of paper 10 times, and you've reached your waist. 20 times and you're above the clouds. 30 times and you are in space. At fold 41, your paper is halfway to the moon. With one fold, the paper will span the gap between the earth and the moon. That's 42 folds from a single sheet of paper, and you are already at the moon. Let's keep going and shoot for the stars. Well, just our star for now. Just a mere 8 folds from the moon will reach the Sun. But why stop there? If you were able to fold the paper 53 more times, you would reach the end of the known universe. What comes after that? We don't exactly have an answer to that. Would the paper just stop existing? Probably not, because the edge of the known universe is just where the light from the universe hasn't had time to reach our eyes. It's still amazing that, in theory, one piece of paper can span the universe.