Torn Up

Imagine a large sheet of rice paper one-thousandth of an inch thick. Tear it in half and stack the pieces, then tear the stack in half and stack those, and so on. If you could do this 50 times in succession, how tall would the final stack be?

A. 0.6 inches
B. 22.84 feet
C. 17 million miles

Surprisingly, the answer is 17 million miles:

250 ply × 0.001 inches/ply
= 1.12589991 × 1012 inches
= 17,769,884.9 miles