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Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944) was a French aviator, writer, and moral philosopher whose work stands among the most enduring explorations of human meaning, courage, and the relationship between solitude and community in the twentieth century. Born into an aristocratic family in Lyon, he pursued aviation at a time when flight was still a frontier art, serving as a commercial and military pilot across Europe, North Africa, and South America. His cockpit became a laboratory for existential reflection, and the sky a medium through which he interrogated what it means to be fully human. Saint-Exupéry’s literary output is inseparable from his vocation as a pilot. Night Flight (1931), Wind, Sand and Stars (1939), and Flight to Arras (1942) drew directly from his aerial experience to trace the moral dimensions of responsibility, sacrifice, and fraternity under risk. The Little Prince (1943), written during wartime exile in New York, became one of the best-selling and most-translated books in history—a deceptively simple fable about perception, love, and the invisible bonds that give life its weight. He disappeared on a reconnaissance mission over the Mediterranean in July 1944, never to return; the mystery of his end deepened the mythic quality already surrounding his life. Saint-Exupéry’s lasting significance lies in his insistence that technology—the airplane above all—does not diminish humanity but can, rightly inhabited, enlarge it. He understood flight not as escape from the earth but as a vantage from which human solidarity becomes visible in a new way. His writing returns persistently to themes of creative discipline, the cultivation of inner life, the obligation of the living toward the lost, and the kind of love that sees what is essential rather than what is merely present. These concerns resonate naturally with the Mormon Transhumanist conviction that the proper work of intelligence and technology is to deepen relationship, expand moral vision, and orient human striving toward the fullest possible flourishing of every soul.

Boyd K. Packer (1924–2015) was one of the most influential and theologically deliberate leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Born on September 10, 1924, in Brigham City, Utah, the tenth of eleven children, he overcame childhood polio, served as a bomber pilot in World War II, and earned a doctorate in education from Brigham Young University before dedicating his life to religious service and teaching. Called to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in 1970, he served as its acting president from 1994 to 2008 and as its president from 2008 until his death on July 3, 2015. Packer’s career spanned more than five decades of general authority service. He worked extensively within the Church Educational System, overseeing seminary and institute programs, and served as a mission president in New England. He served on the scripture revision committee that produced the landmark 1979–1981 LDS editions of the Bible and standard works. He dedicated temples and missions across multiple continents and was a prolific author and teacher. He was also a gifted visual artist, known for his paintings and sculptures of birds—a dimension of his character that reflected a disciplined attention to the natural world and a belief that beauty and truth are inseparable. Packer’s theological legacy is marked by a deep reverence for the eternal sweep of Mormon cosmology. In one memorable interview, he cited the hymn ‘If You Could Hie to Kolob’—that most expansive of Mormon texts, celebrating eternal progression, a plurality of Gods, and worlds without end—and connected it to Brigham Young’s conviction that learning is not a process approaching a terminus but one that opens onto ‘an eternity of knowledge.’ That orientation—toward an unending, ever-expanding intelligence—runs beneath much of Packer’s teaching about the relationship between mortality and eternity, between what we now see and what God sees.

Cameron Dayton is an American video game creative director, novelist, and writer known for his work in the gaming industry and speculative fiction. He has held prominent creative roles at several major studios, contributing to well-known franchises and original intellectual properties. Dayton served as creative director at Certain Affinity and has worked in narrative and creative leadership positions across the video game industry. He is also the author of the novel Etherwalker , a science-fantasy work set in a far-future world where technology and myth have intertwined, exploring themes of lost civilizations, human potential, and the rediscovery of powerful ancient technologies. His fiction often inhabits the intersection of epic fantasy and science fiction, imagining futures in which humanity’s relationship with technology is both perilous and transformative. Dayton has roots in the Latter-day Saint community, and his creative work reflects an imagination shaped by themes resonant with Mormon Transhumanist thought—particularly the idea that humanity’s trajectory involves the responsible stewardship of extraordinary power, and that the boundaries between the mundane and the transcendent are more porous than they appear. His speculative worlds frequently explore the tension between knowledge and wisdom, technological mastery and moral responsibility, echoing the Mormon Transhumanist conviction that scientific and technological progress are inseparable from ethical and spiritual development. His storytelling invites readers to consider what it means for ordinary individuals to inherit or rediscover capacities that border on the divine—a narrative arc that parallels the Latter-day Saint doctrine of theosis and the transhumanist aspiration toward radical human flourishing.