Crazy?

Tear a piece of paper in half. Stack up the two halves. Now tear that stack in half and stack up the resulting four pieces. Now tear the stack of four in half and stack again. Imagine continuing to do this until you had torn and stacked 50 times. (Don't actually try to do this - the stack of paper gets too narrow and too thick, and you just can't.)


IF you could do this tearing and stacking 50 times, how tall would the stack be?

Assume that the paper is regular binder paper - about 0.003 in. thick (three-thousandths of an inch thick).

Just for the sake of argument, let me put it this way. The moon is about 250,000 miles away from earth. If someone said to you they thought this stack of paper would reach farther away than the moon would you think they were crazy? Would they be wrong? If they are wrong is it because their estimate is too high or too low? If they are wrong, how far off are they?