On unique combinations

I must admit, if ever I had heard this before, it did not stick in my mind.  But I'm finding it so remarkable, I'm inclined to think it is new to me:

The chances that anyone has ever shuffled a pack of cards (fairly) in the same way twice in the history of the world, or ever will again, are infinitesimally small. The number of possible ways to order a pack of 52 cards is ’52!’ (“52 factorial”) which means multiplying 52 by 51 by 50… all the way down to 1. The number you get at the end is 8×10^67 (8 with 67 ‘0’s after it), essentially meaning that a randomly shuffled deck has never been seen before and will never be seen again. So next time you shuffle a deck, you should feel pretty special for holding something so unique! Try for yourself – if you make friends with every person on earth and each person shuffles one deck of cards each second, for the age of the Universe, there will be a one in a trillion, trillion, trillion chance of two decks matching.

This came to my attention because all knowing Google, in the form of the Youtube recommendation, wanted me to know it.  Here's the video about it, that makes the pleasing point about the uniqueness of each human, too:

 

Oh - I see now that I search for it on Youtube that this fact turned up on Stephen Fry's QI, too. So maybe I did hear it there, but it just didn't sink in?   Anyway, expanding the point to the uniqueness of each human is a pleasing humanist one that makes it feel more cosmically relevant.