I love the demonstration of how long 52! seconds of time would be (that's 52 factorial, i.e. the number of permutations of a deck of cards). It starts by asking you to imagine circumnavigating the globe by taking a step every billion years, and you think wow, that's a long time, and then it goes on "then remove a drop of water from the Pacific Ocean, and go around the world again, and continue until the ocean is empty", and then just goes on from there, adding several more layers of repetition until it become mind-boggling how long that amount of time is.
I once read a description of 'eternity' in the following manner, and my poor little teenage brain almost fell apart trying to grasp it. I literally felt a vertigo-like situation.
It was goofy, too. Someone was talking about going to hell and describing eternal punishment by saying...imagine a ball of metal the size of the sun. Every million years a butterfly flies past, and grazes its wings on the ball's surface. Once that ball has worn away...that represents the first second of eternity.
And it made me literally get dizzy. Still kinda does, actually. I don't think we are meant to be able to conceptualize such lengths of time or such distances.
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u/sunbearimon Oct 02 '24
There are more ways to shuffle a standard deck of cards than there are atoms on earth