I woke up this morning and decided I was going to do something never before seen in the history of the universe. I started to solve the Riemann Hypothesis, but then thought better of it. Turns out, it is far easier to shuffle a deck of playing cards.

How many different possible combinations are there? More than a couple. Here is the answer in scientific notation:

Here is the number written out:

 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000

Let’s change that number to seconds. If you were to shuffle a standard deck of cards every second, starting at the Big Bang and continuing until today, you would not make a dent in the number. You would need this many years to exhaust all possible combinations:

The age of the universe in years:

So…yeah. Each time you properly shuffle a deck of playing cards, you are creating a sequence that most certainly has never been seen before and will never be seen again. 

Notice that in this instance, uniqueness emerges from permutation. There is nothing special about the sequences, no narrative that can give them meaning. It is simply about the arrangement of playing cards. You might find that astonishing.