22 Fun Facts That Sound Fake But Are Actually 100% Real

—u/ParticularSuite

“Every time you shuffle a deck of cards, the chances are that exact order has never existed before in the history of the universe. The number of possible shuffles is 52 factorial — that’s an 8 followed by 67 zeros.

To picture it, imagine setting a cosmic stopwatch to 52 factorial seconds and pressing start. Then begin walking around the Earth, but take one step every billion years. When you finally complete the lap, remove a single drop from the Pacific Ocean. Do it again and again until the ocean is empty. Then place one sheet of paper on the ground, refill the ocean, and start over. Repeat this process until the stack of paper reaches the sun, 93 million miles high. And when you’re almost done, tear it all down and repeat the entire cycle a thousand more times.

And when you finally check that stopwatch, the number is so enormous it hasn’t even dropped by a single digit. To make it run out, you’d have to repeat this process not once, not a thousand times, but billions upon billions of times.

That’s how unimaginably big 52 factorial really is.”

—u/mechtonia