Doomswitch? Part 6 Last one!

[bigredlemon]

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Probably not. The actual number of possible deck shuffle combinations is 52! If you are not familiar with how big this number is it exceeds the number of atoms in the known universe. Really. Something like 8x10 to the 67th power.


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Not quite. This post is largely off topic but with the nit scientist in me I feel I have to address this.

52! is indeed 8x10^67 but is nowhere near the # of atoms in the universe. Avogadro's number is 6.02x10^23 which represents the number of atoms in a mole of something. How much is a mole? A mole of water for example would weigh 18g or have a volume of 18ml, not very much.

Now consider that the amount of water on Earth is about 326 million cubic miles, which translates to, well, a heck of a lot of atoms[1] (three atoms in a molecule of water on top of that). And that's just counting water...on one planet.

/geek mode off

[1] I did a quick calculation and got about 2.38x10^48 atoms just in earth's oceans.

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The difference between 2x10^48 and 8x10^67 is huge however. One is about 40,000,000,000,000,000,000 times bigger than the other. A quick googling shows that there's 1.33x10^50 atoms on the entire earth. There are 5x10^68 atoms per galaxy. So in conclusion: in the grand scheme of things, nothing you or I do will matter. Even the Hitlers and Ghandis of the world are less than a spec of sand in the beach of the universe.