Prepare to have your mind completely blown: there are more ways to arrange a deck of cards than there are atoms on our entire planet!
When you shuffle a standard 52-card deck, the number of possible arrangements is so big it has 67 zeros after it. That's bigger than we can even imagine!
Scientists estimate there are about 50 zeros worth of atoms on Earth. The card number has 17 more zeros than that!
Imagine you've been shuffling cards once every second since the dinosaurs died out 66 million years ago. You still wouldn't have tried even a tiny fraction of all the possible ways to arrange those cards!
Every time you shuffle a deck of cards, you're probably creating an arrangement that has never existed beforein human history - and probably never will again.
Your random shuffle at game night created something completely unique in the entire universe.
Why does this happen? Each card you place affects all the others. The first card can be any of 52 cards. The second card can be any of the remaining 51. The third can be any of 50, and so on. When you multiply 52 × 51 × 50 × 49... all the way down to 1, you get this impossibly huge number.
That ordinary deck of cards sitting in your junk drawer contains more possibilities than there are atoms in mountains, oceans, and everything else on Earth combined!