Any shuffled deck of playing cards, believe it or not, has never before, in the history of our planet, been in that order.
How can we know that? It’s a simple mathematical fact. The order of cards is a gigantic number. It’s a number known by mathematicians as ‘52 factorial’, otherwise known as 52! or 52 shriek (52 x 51 x 50 x 49 and so on). And that number is big. It’s this big:
80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766, 975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000.
This number is so big that were you to imagine if every star in our galaxy had a trillion planets, each with a trillion people living on them, and each of these people had a trillion packs of cards, and somehow they managed to shuffle them all one thousand times a second, and they had been doing that since the Big Bang, they would only just now be starting to repeat shuffles.
So when you shuffle a deck of cards, you can say with all the mathematical certainty that is possible that the deck you shuffled has never been in that order before. It’s an absolute world first.
