9441. The existence of a large number of worlds may be evident to anyone from the fact that so many heavenly bodies appear throughout the sky; that each one, as is well known in the learned world, resembles the sun in its own place, since each remains fixed in the same way as our planet's sun does in its own place, but that distance causes it to be seen as something small, as a point of light; and that consequently each has planets or earths around it in the same way as the sun of our world has. Why else does so vast a sky with so many constellations exist? The whole reason why the universe has been created and exists is mankind, from whom an angelic heaven may be formed. But what would the human race on only one planet be, and what would the angelic heaven formed from it be for the Infinite Creator? For Him a thousand planets - no, tens of thousands - would not be enough. The following calculation has been made. Supposing that there were a thousand thousand planets in the universe, on each planet three hundred thousand thousand or three hundred million people, two hundred generations in six thousand years, and the space each person was allowed was three cubic ells.^a If all these people were gathered together in one place the space they would fill would still be no more than a thousandth of our planet, and so would be less than the space filled by one satellite around the planet Jupiter or the planet Saturn. The space they filled in the universe would be small and hard to see, for those satellites are scarcely visible to the naked eye. What would this be for the Creator of the universe, for whom the whole universe, even if it were full up, would not be enough, since He is Infinite? I have talked to angels about these matters. They have said that they have a similar conception of how few the members of the human race are compared with the infinity of the Creator, though their thinking is based not on notions of objects measured spatially, but on those of states, and that as they conceive the matter the planets numbering tens of thousands, as many as anyone could think of, would still be as absolutely nothing in relation to the Lord. In addition they have said that the angelic heaven, whose seed-bed is the human race, corresponds to everything within the human being, and such a heaven cannot be built up with angels from only one planet; it must be built up with those from countless planets.

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