Never Bring a Logarithm to an Exaltation

The following post began quite spontaneously when I woke up in the middle of the prior night and decided to cross-check some of my dubious insights with a calculator. At first I thought 'no, it can't be; all of my intuitive discovery this past week has been a wishful-then-horrific delusion; okay for satirical worldbuilding, but not reflective of any deeper reality'. Then I thought, 'well, hmm, perhaps it can be?' Could humanity only now have matured to apply some logarithmic calculations to its promised future glory, without screaming and running away?

Having a knowledge of God, we begin to know how to approach him, and how to ask so as to receive an answer. When we understand the character of God, and how to come to him, he begins to unfold the heavens to us, and to tell us all about it. When we are ready to come to him, he is ready to come to us.

-- from the King Follett discourse

In case you hadn’t noticed from my prior post, I’m expecting to run this blog from a viewpoint more sympathetic to Mormon teaching than I would ever have expected to be. At the same time, I am taking Mormon teaching seriously through a lens that all of the novel ideas in it are hopelessly-distorted by the understandable and forgivable preconceptions of the people who received the revelation on an extremely resource-constrained planet… because one of the disconcerting intuitive data-points that led to my 2023 upheaval was an idle contemplation (entirely hypothetical at first!) of various exponentially-expanding civilizations of immortal beings, and becoming convinced of both the plausibility and the utter numerical and logistical insanity of such a reality. An exponentially-expanding civilization is what results from the Mormon blessing of exaltation and celestial marriage, applied to (fractions of) successive generations of spirit-children. You see, those who want to have children in the Mormon Heaven, will have children and on average they’re not exactly going to want to stop, nor ought they be forbidden to continue if they are doing a good job. As for people who just can’t see raising a neverending succession of children as an unspeakably fun time, well, that is what the two other degrees of glory are for. According to entirely-official LDS teaching, no one is exactly pressuring anyone to enter a blissful infinite marriage here.

In this post I will not be talking (much) about the supposedly-extant Enochian civilization and its splinter groups. Instead I will get myself onto the far more solid and well-understood doctrinal ground (ha!) of the promised final state of post-Resurrected exalted humanity and do a dangerous thing. I will bring a calculator. Or, actually, just a napkin. I realized very quickly that a calculator is too much high technology for the tremendous simplicity of the divine wisdom on display here.

Before we continue, it will be useful to have the following estimates burned firmly into one's retinas:

• Number of galaxies in a typical universe: 10^13.
• Typical universe determined from sample size of one; taking highball estimate of 2 trillion visible galaxies and rounding up to account for the possibility that not everything is visible to Science all the time.
• Number of stars in a typical galaxy: 10^11.
• Taking a lowball estimate of 100 billion stars.
• Number of desirable planets around a star, on average: 10
• Medium-balling this time. Assuming godlike terraforming magic, many stars in the universe still seem purely-decorative: unstable multi-star configurations, dense globular clusters, and the lovely arrangements of fast-moving 'dancing firefly' stars around a galactic black hole are probably unsuitable, though a well-tuned set of dancing fireflies makes a very nice destination to bring a significant other on a picnic-date. Yes you could, with sufficient physics-bending enchantments, manage to park a viable crèche of a few hundred thousand spirit-children around that same black hole, but very few exalted mothers will want to be that edgy. Still, the number might be made-up-for by large complex systems such as our own solar-system, full of interesting and not-too-difficult fixer-upper worlds, akin to the 1950s starter-house with an unfinished basement. Exalted and creative-minded humans who have spent their adolescence reading glossy books of astronomy and dreaming of terra-forming Mars with absurd Macgyver devices such as orbital mirrors, will not hesitate to put in the effort to use newly-granted actual divine powers to turn supposed 'uninhabitable' planets and moons into very nice and interesting places to live. Scenic but distant gas-giant moons lacking solar radiation? Well, Tolkien's trees of Valinor are one perfectly good design-concept for poorly-lit locations. Rogue planets in interstellar space? Seems a bit lonely, but actually a good option for families who just can't let go of the tourist bug they caught on Earth: you can move the thing around to visit far-flung regions of the universe and no one will complain that they have to update their solar system’s orreries.
• Number of mortal humans on a typical Earthlike planet: 10^10 x 10 generations
• If there were no genius-famine and if Ahriman and Sorath were not utterly ruining modern mortal civilization, 10 billion would perhaps be a viable figure for a stable mortal population for this type of planet. Oversimplifying, let us pretend the 10 billion population lasts for 10 generations and ignore the rest of history as a rounding-error. If I were properly Intellectual about this, I would draw a spiky bell-curve for the likely meteoric rise and meteoric collapse of our actual mortal population and integrate the area underneath... but I am using a napkin.

We can now answer various questions that you may not have previously considered asking, and may not desire to continue contemplating after you've finished reading the post.

Do Mormons Get Their Own Planet? What is darkly hilarious — and what synchronistically prompted the drafting of this post — is that the LDS church, fearing the world’s mockery, has tended to disavow their own folklore idea that exalted individuals will receive a personal planet to rule over. The web results that popped up when I tried to check whether anyone prior to me has attempted this intellectual exercise turned out to be a cringeworthy pile of Mouth-of-Sauron mainstream-media articles along the lines of "LDS leaders disavow idea that Mormons will get their own planet". That is my punishment for attempting to use web-search in 2023 to find actual information.

Of course, both mainstream journalists and LDS leaders have heard of calculators and napkins, but it is doubtful either group uses calculators to do Theology on a regular basis. Much less napkins.

Well... if we are going by the Earthly Mormon Church and assume for a moment we are in a truly Rare-Earth Universe such that all the planetary stewards of this tiny local galaxy are to be recruited and exalted here -- let us consult our retinas for the numbers:

• 10^11 stars times 10 desireable planets per 10 generations of 10^10 mortal humans
• (of whom not-exactly all are, or want to be, exalted Mormon saints; exercise for the reader to re-do this calculation with the population of actual LDS Church members to understand why... this is not really the place for exclusive soteriology)
• equals 10 desireable planets per human; 20 if one accounts for the observation that it's married couples (at the very least) who are in the market for the things

In this situation, forget whether Mormons deserve their own planets, God is going to have a fire-sale on the things. Forget jumping through procedural hoops (pick correct obscure Church, do rituals and home-visits for years and years, project unwavering 1950s-conventional-American wholesomeness, be sure not to fall away) to gain exaltation. To get His empty mansions furnished, God would be literally-desperate to persuade any functional individual on this Earth to agree to being married-off and exalted, extending eligibility on the flimsiest of technical or sacramental excuses. After all, most parents learn on the job. And there are a few trillion other galaxies to settle once this one has been properly cultivated.

Okay, but let's say Earth is not the only planet recruiting for exaltation... going by a throwaway reference to 'millions' of inhabited worlds in the universe according to the book of Moses, say a nice 100 million (10^8), while also expanding the real-estate market to the entire universe, we get:

• 10^13 galaxies times 10^11 stars times 10 desireable planets per 10 generations of 10^10 mortal beings on 10^8 inhabited planets
• ... equals 10^(25-19) = 10^6 or 1 million desireable planets per mortal being; or 2 million per married couple

Definitely a seller's market in planetary real-estate. But, of course, that is just to arrange starter-homes for a first generation of gods. In the King Follett section to follow, we will get to the interesting era when three-dimensional expansion starts to feel a bit too cozy and our exalted families end up shopping for extradimensional real-estate.

Does King Follett Work in Three Dimensions? The King Follett sermon introduces the idea of indefinite regression of gods, which LDS spent the ensuing decades and centuries backpedalling away from. Still, hymns like 'Hie to Kolob' continue to espouse the idea:

If you could hie to Kolob In the twinkling of an eye,

And then continue onward With that same speed to fly,

Do you think that you could ever, Through all eternity,

Find out the generation Where Gods began to be?

Or see the grand beginning, Where space did not extend?

Or view the last creation, Where Gods and matter end?

Me thinks the Spirit whispers, “No man has found ‘pure space,’

Nor seen the outside curtains, Where nothing has a place.”

The works of God continue, And worlds and lives abound;

Improvement and progression Have one eternal round.

There is no end to matter; There is no end to space;

There is no end to spirit; There is no end to race.

-- lyrics by W. W. Phelps

(any screed about Mormon exaltation is obliged to have something with telescope-shots of distant stars and nebulae; how Mormons formatted their apologetics prior to the age of astrophotography, will remain a mystery)

Ok... but even the King Follett people tend to imagine that this never-ending never-beginning outflow of Love takes place in regular old three-dimensional outer-space. That's what the photos of nebulae and galaxies in the Mormon apologetic pamphlets seem to hint. An enormous tide of divine-humanity that competes in finding ever-new regions of primordial matter to shape into increasingly-populous and increasingly-glorified forms.

What's brilliantly trollish (in a Good way) on the part of the celestial co-authors of the King Follett sermon is that once spoken and thought, it could never be unthought in its entirety, no matter how sternly the LDS Church kept pronouncing on its non-canonicity. Not without completely abandoning the doctrine of celestial marriage and exaltation, the very raison d'etre for the Mormon congregation to have gone through the painful and tumultuous process of religious schism from the mainline Christians in the first place. Even if refuted, the King Follett image is destined to be true-enough at some distant point in the future. It is perfectly logical from the premises and, as Joseph Smith so aptly puts it, it tastes good. To put the King Follett image away properly, the LDS Church leadership, just like any other Church leadership, could only succeed if they manage to imagine or invent a more logical image of Reality that also tastes just as good. They are unable, being bureaucrats by profession.

Consider the process by which the LDS manifested the King Follett insights -- a sermon delivered perhaps-impromptu, certainly under the strong impression of his own oncoming-death on the part of Joseph Smith -- such an impression tends to bring out immense charisma in preachers -- and consider the process by which the LDS tried to edit out all the weirdness they didn't have the stamina to defend or justify. To my mind, it rather mirrors the process by which a writer will write a, perhaps flawed, rough-draft, and then laboriously edit it into a superficially 'polished' product in a process that incidentally scrapes away all of the interesting and valuable parts.

To backpedal from the full King Follett by a mere bare-minimum, suppose the Father of Jesus Christ is the original God, Maker of All, and the humans of this Earth are incarnated from the first-ever batch of spirit-children in all of existence. This doctrine is perhaps quite flattering to us and therefore tastes good, better than straight-up King Follett, though to assume ourselves so special is not as logical. But, after the first-ever spirit-children are exalted in Mormon-fashion, and beget their own divine-families, and enact various plans of salvation to exalt their own offspring, and the process repeats over thousands or millions of years, we will eventually witness far descendants, spirit-children of unimaginable variety, being born into a universe populated by their distant cousins and great-uncles and faraway divine Great Ancestors, then... contrary to the lyrics of 'Hie to Kolob', one could certainly make a solemn pilgrimage to the beginning of all things and fall at the feet of the one and only Christ who made it all possible -- but one's local family-tree will extend indefinitely-enough to replicate the King Follett experience in all truly important respects. One will never stop discovering distant relatives, ancestors, and eventual-descendants who manifest Cosmic Family-Love in a manner that teaches new and unspeakably-exciting things. That, I think, is the real point to the King Follett stuff, not the abstract philosophical-scientific investigation of whether Beings have no beginning and no end or a beginning and no end, or of whether the geometric continuum of Reality and Time is mathematically bounded or unbounded.

But I simply must play the philosopher and ask: is a mere three-dimensional canvas sufficient to paint the image of Family-Life on the divinely-envisioned King Follett scale?

In this section, let us ease the mathematical pain a little by resorting to geometry rather than exponential notation. After all, the key intuition here is geometric. The volume of a three-dimensional shape grows as the cube of its length; the surface, only as the square. If we start a King Follett family in any part of a mere three-dimensional space-time, and assume population density is roughly constant, we find that as the population and therefore three-dimensional volume of the settled-area grows exponentially, the trickle of newly-exalted Gods heading out to settle the merely-two-dimensional frontier of that area eventually turns into a dense crowd, a Niagara of deities that only gets ever-more-densely-packed, no matter how picky each individual divine-family might be about granting only their absolute model children full celestial ascension.

There are, perhaps, one or two kluges that could allow us to cheat this basic geometric issue and to enact King Follett without resorting to a full-on multiverse:

• Expansion of space within the home-neighbourhood so not everyone is forced to the frontiers. Our own universe displays a hint of this. But continuing the process exponentially has the nasty downside that with every passing aion your familiar neighbours will drift further away, requiring increasingly-miraculous long-distance fast travel to do the neighbourly thing and borrow a cup of sugar. This leads smoothly to the alternate solution....
• ... long-distance portals or (essentially) teleportation to connect logically-related but unimaginably-distant portions of space in a way that makes speed of travel irrelevant, and to try to jump ahead of the eventual traffic-jam of newly-ascended Gods headed for the unsettled frontier. This is already an ersatz multiverse of sorts.

But to me, King Follett suggests a true multiverse with a 'fanout' structure of portals or travel-ways joining together the various branches of the divine family, as the most comfortable and simple and perfectly-conceivable solution. It is already on-display and perfectly-comprehensible to mere children in a work such as 'Narnia'. And it tastes good as a means of encouraging creativity on the celestial level. After all, every new dimension of space is a chance to experiment with new and different patterns of arranging matter on a clean-slate. Flat-earth planes with no boundary, infinite oceans and cloudscapes, non-standard planetary shapes within interplanetary atmospheres all seem worth trying, and require separate dimensions of space... by comparison, our empty interstellar and intergalactic vacuums of space are perhaps merely the solemn silent pauses between the few slow and tense notes of a prelude to the Grand Cosmic Music, deliberately meant to heighten-by-contrast the impact of subsequent movements of fierce and exuberant and densely-packed sound. Our particular universe is therefore, if not the very first or the only, then certainly important to the prelude before the main story.

(I also suspect that merely terrestrial glory comes with quite-adequate godlike abilities to discover, explore, and gradually-alter and cultivate the matter within existing universes. The power to create entirely new universes and new types of universes is one of the exclusive privileges marking the higher celestial degree of glory. I would contend that almost every 'superpower' or 'godlike power' imaginable based on mortal experience in fact belongs merely to the terrestrial realm. That is, while we can imagine the act of someone creating an entirely-new universe or dimension in terms of its consequences, we cannot imagine what the process would be like from the point of view of the creator.)

Brief Digression on the pre-Resurrection Enochians. In my prior post, I’ve skirted the question of whether Enochians reproduce, merely stating that their civilization is not static. This could refer to innovation or to population-growth.

In the utterly crazy scenario I started with, the one I’m still intending to use for ‘Steelman Paradise’ -- an unpublished story-world I continue to tinker with until it can become just sane enough to publish -- adult residents of the unimaginably but computably-vast Cosmic Civilization of the Houri are invariably and rather involuntarily extremely-fertile. This worldbuilding detail is worth keeping, at the very least, for its potential in terms of comedic family-politics. But apart from their perhaps-exaggerated fertility and their very skewed ratio of the sexes, houri have a suspicious resemblance to a 'lost tribe of Enochians' that fled 100,000s of universes away from Zion and ended up denying their origins, leading their descendants to fill the gaping spiritual void with Other Monotheism and Buddhism. When estimating the shape of the houri civilization, their fertility-rate and rather-casual manner of gaining immortality give absurd results that make King Follett expansion seem leisurely by comparison. The scenario is perhaps worth returning to as a stress-test estimate -- if terrestrial Enochian civilization even on this scale can be justified, then there is no problem to justify the more-tame versions that are more-likely to be attested by scriptures and that can fit into less mindbogglingly-huge systems of universes.

Metaphysically-enforced Righteous Old Testament Marriage, you see, is the stopgap that guards Houri against complete moral degradation. Speculating all-too-freely, it makes sense to me that if celestial marriage is the engine of divine exaltation then, prior to the availability of Christ's victory, a lesser blessing of terrestrial marriage would be the proper, perhaps the only possible, engine to ensure the lesser terrestrial immortality that Enochians enjoy. It is, then, the enacted power of the righteous marital love of one's significant other that preserves the body and mind of an Enochian from lasting harm. No Enochian immortal is alive of himself or herself, which makes him or her a somewhat lesser form of Being than the resurrected Saints to whom Christ has promised an internal fountain-of-endless-life (John 4:14) regardless of marital status. Therefore, whether or not they are fertile, it would seem quite-Mormon to insist that all adult Enochians marry, certainly in the morally-exemplary city of Zion that is cited as being a communal-family society in entirely Old Testament and Mormon fashion. But I cannot actually insist on these ideas without evidence.

In a more realistic scenario, where Enochians are sterile and therefore not presently expanding through the multiverse in uncontrolled-exponential fashion, they are still documented to adopt humans from Earth by 'translation', cf MormonWiki:

During the time from the fall of Adam to the ministry of Melchizedek, numerous people were translated. Enoch and his people were translated (Moses 7:18–21, 31, 63, 69). They were citizens of the City of Enoch, also called Zion; Zion appears to have been a very populous city. During the nearly 700 years from the translation of Enoch and Zion, it appears that nearly all the faithful members of the Church were translated, for "the Holy Ghost fell on many, and they were caught up by the powers of heaven into Zion" (Moses 7:27).

-- https://www.mormonwiki.com/Translated_Beings

Especially if they were authorized to do this on multiple worlds, then Enoch's Zion would have grown substantially, though not crazy-exponentially, by mere adoption of righteous mortals over a fairly long period of history.

(Personally, I fear to succumb to too much timid intellectual realism, but I do need to display due and proper bias towards such moderately-sane hypotheses to avoid completely alienating my potential readership.)

In general, the possible size-ranges and expansion-rates of Enochian civilization and its growth relative to the larger system of mortal worlds would be a topic for a much longer post, therefore detailed calculations and citations have been omitted.

Conclusions, for the time being. What I find utterly ironic: unbound by matter or human categories of thought, the Catholic/Orthodox omni-God ought to be infinitely more capable of, on a mere lark, exalting countless beings of unimaginable power -- who would still be absolutely no threat to His own infinite and ineffable power. (Indeed, one would expect renegade Enochians themselves to be strongly biased towards omni-God religions for this exact reason.) These beings could people untold exponentially-expanding multi-dimensional multiversal realms of cuddly madness that properly mirror the incomprehensible and jolly benevolent madness of omni-God... and yet whenever omni-God showed up in mortal thinking He was usually imagined to be creating one Earth, culling most of the population through stringent and brutal judgments and ritual requirements, and leaving a handful of sterile adamantine-bodied Saints to populate his Mausoleum of Theological Virtues. What an… utterly boring Heaven. It’s the Mormons with their entirely incarnate and separate gods localized in space and bound to time that have dared to imagine anything close to more-expansive. And then usually back-pedalled mightily away from the ironically-vast grandeur implied by their simple and cheerful doctrines and by their small and supposedly-limited entirely incarnate gods. Of course, mere infinity is utterly flat to the human imagination; we sense no dimension to it and it does not naturally occur to us that unimaginable infinity also contains various kinds of imaginably vast and relatable finity.

Modern astronomy, to a Christian who believes visible Creation is not some accidental conglomeration of matter, tends increasingly to push the discussion about potential-heavens in a 'Mormon' sort of direction. We happen to be located in a vast universe close to the 'Rare Earth' end of the spectrum, where God has installed a dizzying abundance of pretty but rather depressingly-empty rocks overhead as a placeholder and message to latter-day mortal humanity especially: ‘Your interesting ideas go here, if you can make it off the ground. No, stop stuffing rockets full of exploding chemicals and trying to find abstruse loopholes in the speed of light, and at least listen to your heart if you want to fly. The stuff you really need to know fits in a short pamphlet.’

Of course, there's also the CS Lewis Space-Trilogy model of 'most of the universe is not intended for humans and never will be', which is... a good topic for an entirely different post. And not the immediately-next one.