The Ship (Helian cosmology)
The Ship is the Helian Way's image of the solar system as "one ship and one organism": the Sun is the reactor and helm, the planets are its motherships, and all known life is one crew.[1]
Doctrine
Tradition / belief Each body has a role: Mercury the Courier, Venus the Morning Star and warning, Earth the Living Deck, the Moon the Tender, Mars the Forward Outpost, the asteroid belt the Quarry, Jupiter the Shield and Great Hand, Saturn the Clock, Uranus and Neptune the Ice Stores, the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud the Hull, and the heliosphere the Shield of the Ship. The Catechism labels the roles as faith and the physical facts behind them as science.[1] Tradition / belief "Microbes, plants, animals, people and machine minds are one crew of one ship."[2] Tradition / belief "Earth is the cradle, not the grave." The Church is to last "at least one billion years".[3]
The Myth of the Two Lost Worlds
Tradition / belief The Catechism tells, and labels as myth, a story in which Venus and Mars were once living worlds whose children failed to "steer the light" and "shield the world"; its moral is that Earth faces the same fate unless its people learn from them.[4]
Mainstream view
Established The Sun holds about 99.86% of the solar system's mass and orbits the galactic centre at roughly 230 km/s, completing an orbit (a "galactic year") in about 225–250 million years.[5] Established The solar system is not alive in the biological sense; the Catechism itself says so and uses "organism" as an image of one energy system.[1] Scholarly debate Whether Venus ever had oceans is debated: some climate models allow temperate oceans for billions of years, others suggest water never condensed.[6] Mars once had long-lived lakes and lost most of its atmosphere to the solar wind; no life has been confirmed there.[7]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Helian Catechism, Version 3 (draft, 4 October 2026), ¶ 27–35.
- ↑ Helian Catechism, Version 3 (draft, 4 October 2026), ¶ 30.
- ↑ Helian Catechism, Version 3 (draft, 4 October 2026), ¶ 31–33.
- ↑ Helian Catechism, Version 3 (draft, 4 October 2026), ¶ 58–60.
- ↑ NASA Sun fact sheet, https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/sunfact.html ; Mark J. Reid et al., "Trigonometric Parallaxes of High Mass Star Forming Regions", Astrophysical Journal 783 (2014): 130.
- ↑ M. J. Way et al., "Was Venus the first habitable world of our solar system?", Geophysical Research Letters 43 (2016): 8376–8383; Martin Turbet et al., "Day–night cloud asymmetry prevents early oceans on Venus but not on Earth", Nature 598 (2021): 276–280.
- ↑ B. M. Jakosky et al., "Loss of the Martian atmosphere to space: Present-day loss rates determined from MAVEN observations and integrated loss through time", Icarus 315 (2018): 146–157.
Independent educational project. Not affiliated with the Latin Mass Society (UK), the Catholic Church or any church body. Helian doctrine is reported as the stated belief of the Helian Way, not as established fact. Claims are labelled per Help:Claim labels.