A sheet of paper appears every second under your feet

One sheet of paper appears under your feet. Then another. One every second, forever, and you can't die. After an hour you're 36 cm taller. After a month you're above the Shard. But how long until you reach space? The Moon? The edge of the Solar System? The black hole at the centre of the galaxy? Worked out with real physics and real numbers, from a London pavement to 80 quadrillion years in the future. How long it takes: 32 years: the edge of space 120,000 years: the Moon 5.7 billion years: the edge of the Solar System 80 quadrillion years: the centre of the galaxy Never: the next cluster of galaxies (space expands about 10 billion times faster than your stack grows) Chapters 0:00 Second 1 · It begins 0:17 Minute 1 · Six millimetres 0:29 Hour 1 · Definitely taller 0:41 Day 1 · Three storeys 0:53 Day 11 · Big Ben 1:05 Month 1 · Above the Shard 1:18 Month 4 · In the clouds 1:30 Year 1 · You can see France 1:43 Year 2.8 · Everest 1:55 Year 3½ · Flight level 2:07 Year 8 · The ozone layer 2:19 Year 13 · Record height 2:31 Year 32 · Space 2:44 Year 133 · Satellite alley 2:56 Year 12,000 · A new North Star 3:09 Year 16,000 · Weightless 3:21 Year 60,000 · The sky changes 3:34 Year 120,000 · The Moon 3:47 Year 445,000 · Pale blue marble 3:59 1.3 million years · A passing star 4:12 10 million years · Africa splits 4:24 47 million years · One sunlight away 4:37 250 million years · Pangaea Ultima 4:50 580 million years · The whip 5:04 600 million years · The last eclipse 5:17 1 billion years · The oceans boil 5:29 1.4 billion years · Neptune 5:41 2.8 billion years · The last life 5:53 5.7 billion years · Edge of the Solar System 6:06 7.6 billion years · Red giant 6:19 8 billion years · White dwarf 6:31 10 billion years · Andromeda arrives 6:45 150 billion years · Alone 6:59 4.7 trillion years · The last comet 7:11 13 trillion years · The nearest star 7:24 100 trillion years · Lights out 7:36 10¹⁵ years · Adrift 7:49 80 quadrillion years · The galactic centre The assumptions • Ordinary A4 printer paper: 80 g/m², 0.1 mm thick, 5 g a sheet. One sheet per second, so the stack grows a steady 0.1 mm per second (36 cm an hour, 3.2 km a year). • The stack can't topple, bend, squash or break, and the paper never decays. (A real loose stack would fall over on day one.) • You always stay on top, and you can't die. • The stack stands in London (51.5° N) and turns with the Earth. Its growing weight slows Earth's spin (angular momentum is conserved): the tip peaks at about 19% of light speed after 580 million years, and by 5 billion years a day lasts a year. • From London's latitude the stack points too far north to ever hit the Moon or the Sun. • Earth survives the Sun's red-giant phase (the models disagree; some say it's swallowed). • Andromeda merges with the Milky Way within about 10 billion years (roughly even odds with the latest data). • The pull of the Sun and Moon on the stack, and the stack's own gravity, are ignored. Tides are ignored for the length of the day. • Distances to stars and galaxies are today's distances. • Some sizes are drawn bigger than life so you can see them (noted on screen). Music and sound effects are original, made for this video. What absurd question should we answer next? Leave it in the comments. #whatif #science #physics