Heaven is a planet 80 times bigger than Earth! Or so the late Percy Collett revealed to the world. For years I’ve had a vague memory about a Missionary with a story about a trip to Heaven. Thanks to the wonders of Google I tracked it down – he visited Australia in 1989, on a speaking tour of various Pentecostal Churches. One of which was near my home town and I had managed to catch a radio advert for, thus the memory.
Thanks to his faithful disciples’ transcripts, and notes taken down by sceptical investigators, I gather Dr. Percy told a lurid tale of being carried to Heaven, which is 3 trillion miles away (half a light-year), in just six hours by an Angel, dipping past the Sun and planets on the way. He saw the New Earth, which is being constructed near Heaven, then Heaven itself, which is 2 million miles around. Immense buildings form God’s City, with the Giant Gold Cube City from the Apocalypse included.
Such visions are nothing new and Dr. Collett’s visions don’t add much to the canon. The pseudonymous “Enoch” started the Judeo-Christian craze for big visionary journeys, but the Akkadians and Sumerians had their own versions, predating the current crop by a millennium or two. Updated to a post-Copernican Universe, but the message isn’t new or startling. Jesus is still coming back “some time soon” so you’d better be good, for goodness’ sake…
The physics of Heaven is a bit more interesting. A solid planet can’t be 80 times bigger than Earth, as its gravity compresses its atoms into higher and higher densities past a certain mass. At most it would be 3-4 times Earth size. Even made of the lightest element, hydrogen, means planets max-out at just over Jupiter’s size for pure hydrogen planets – thus at most about 15 times as big as Earth. To be 80 times Earth’s size, the planet must be a “Super-mundane” planet – an artificial shell world around a natural object within. To be 80 times bigger than Earth, then by Newton’s gravitational equations, that means it masses (80)^2= 6,400 times Earth’s mass to give Earth gravity on the surface. If we assume a negligible Shell mass, then that’s a 20 Jupiter mass central object – coincidentally (?) a brown dwarf object might lurk in the Oort Cloud at roughly 3 trillion miles with about that mass. Whitmire & Matese, within the constraints computed by Lorenzo Iorio, would put a Super-Jovian out there.
So is Heaven really a vast artificial planet? Once upon a time, it was a solid or aethereal shell directly above our heads and we were like deep-sea fish on this heavier, grosser world. Once the crystal or aethereal spheres were shattered in the 16th & 17th Centuries, Heaven has been looking for a new locale. More modern updates have pushed it into Hyperspace, or totally other space-times or Eternities, but maybe it conceptually lurks just beyond our present day reach, and always will. Alternatively, the Mystics, like Jakob Boehme, place it “next door” to our everyday world, accessible by all who are ready to see it.