I’m so happy that I was so wrong last week when I predicted that President Nelson would call two white men from Utah to fill the openings in the Quorum of the Twelve. I’m thrilled that Elders Gong and Soares can bring some new perspectives to the Q15. And of course, one of the first things I looked up when I learned that they had been called was how old they are, because I was curious about what the chances were that either of them would make it to be Church President.

In this post, I’ve updated the simulation that I’ve run before to estimate the probabilities of each Q15 member becoming Church President. I last did this just a few months ago when President Monson passed away. The gist of it is that I use a mortality table from the Society of Actuaries, assume that the yearly mortality probabilities apply to all members of the Q15 equally, and then run a bunch of simulations (100,000 in this case) and in each, pick a bunch of random numbers and compare them to the mortality probabilities for each member and use the comparison to work out how much longer each man would live, and the resulting way that the Presidency would be handed from one member to the next–which members would get to serve as President and which ones wouldn’t. The process is described in a little more detail in this post from 2015. Anyway, the numbers for the most senior 13 members have changed little since my post in January. What’s interesting here is the probabilities for the new Q15 members.

The table below shows the probability of each Q15 member becoming Church President, and how many years he would serve if he did. Note that if you compare carefully, you might notice some small discrepancies between this table and the one in my January post. When I was running the simulations for this post, I realized that when I ran simulations for my January post, I had calculated current age by rounding to the nearest birthday (e.g., a man who is 65 and 7 months is counted as being 66) rather than the more conventional approach of calculating it by just looking at last birthday passed. If you noticed this error in the previous post and didn’t feel the need to correct me, thank you!

As you can guess from the title of this post, I was thinking that Elder Soares might have a good chance of eventually becoming President. He does follow the pattern of other Q15 members who also have high probabilities: as he enters the quorum, he is younger than anyone senior to him. Unfortunately (for his chances), he’s not that much younger. He’s not quite three years younger than Elder Stevenson. He also faces a logjam of men currently in their sixties who are ahead of him in seniority. He is likely to outlive any one of them, but as you can see in the table, his probability of outliving all of them is only about one in three.

Among other quorum members, President Oaks still shows a high probability, given that he’s next in line and eight years younger than President Nelson. Then just a couple of men down, Elder Holland is eight years younger than anyone senior to him. And a couple of more down, Elder Bednar is over a decade younger than anyone senior to him.

The graph below shows each member’s probability of being President by year. Again, this looks very much like what I posted in January, with the exception of the new data on the two new members. Note also that I’ve changed the Y-axis to show only probabilities up to 60% to make it easier to see the bunched up lines at the bottom, and I’ve extended the time period covered out to 2053 so I could include each quorum member’s peak probability year.

This makes even clearer than the table, I think, how much the Oaks-Holland-Bednar progression seems likely to happen. But then, this is not new information. I think this order of Church Presidents has seemed likely ever since I started looking at this stuff almost ten years ago.