I think of this essay every time I hear of someone researching how to live forever. Imagine the sheer variety of misfortunes that could befall you when you live long enough to walk the whole earth, taking one step every billion years, and it’s a meager dent in your overall timeline?

I love how even those broken down tasks ("take one drop of the Atlantic ocean until it's empty") can barely fit into my imagination. It's just SUCH a vast amount of time/water drops/steps/... – and still it is nothing compared to 52!

Use a little symmetry and you obviate a few of those steps. Equivalent cut deck here, reversed pair there, ignored suits when faces match. Still anticipate waiting for forests to evolve that can produce multiple AUs high stacks of paper, or locating another basin to put all the water from the Pacific Ocean.

As I found in solving and generating Kakuro puzzles Euler's Number appears here too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derangement

The description of eternity in "The Shepard Boy" is supersimilar to Buddha's description of the kalpa, neat.

My math teacher in high school gave us this number to ponder: 4^4^4^4 It makes 52! seem like a speck of dust.

> Our brain is not made to understand these extreme quantities.

In the context of the infinitesimal, it feels like there ought to be a corresponding word like "inquantities" or "unquantities."

The rare event at scale, it not rare anymore.