Welcome back to XLGBT’s future, in which the more things change, the more other things shift to encompass new targets. Enjoy…

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Comment: Is There Intelligent Life on Mars? : Filed- Tan Bao Young.

Two centuries ago, a revered clone ancestor of mine was involved with the early samesexer equality politics of the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. He was a fierce critic of the adversaries of samesexer and other social movements of that past world, but an perceptive analyst of their discourse, tactics and strategy.

Sometimes, I wonder if that ancestor would sagely nod and laugh at today’s Terran Federation solar system political configurations and current inner tensions. He’d probably be pleasantly surprised that it was predominantly same-sexers that colonised Ganymede, even if its complete terraforming into a habitable earthlike world will take another century to complete. As he was a strong supporter of the women’s  multiple personality rights movement of the 2030s, I imagine he’d quite appreciate our neighbours, the Sisterhood of Scylla and Charybdis, on neighbouring Callisto, or the Cybertacea colonies on Europa’s undersheet oceans, and the hardy Hindi miners on the roiling volcanic surface of Io.

All in all, the Gallilean Confederacy satellites get on quite well with one another, and with our Saturnian colleagues who have claimed Titan as a petrochemical and plastics production centre, one of the growing system powers of the early twenty-third century.

Why can’t the rest of the solar system get on with one another so easily?  Most of that question is related to the relentless polarisation that has its roots in Jovian and Saturnian satellite colonisation, which shifted the centre of system economic power outward from Earth, Luna and Mars.  When we made first contact with Hestia, Alpha Centauri’s insectoid dominated world, that was okay.  The insectoids favour social stability and tradition, so they got on quite well with the Christomoslem/shiavangelical revivalism that swept Mars during their recessions late last century.

And then we met the Minervans, and some of us fell in love literally with some of them, which led Christomoslem Mart revivalist clergy to declare such relationships anathema, and establish Humanity First.  Ganymede got angry at this, given our own samesexer founders had had similar experiences of persecution, and so we helped bankroll Sentience For All. And, as I’ve  noted before, Dao Xing Chao is their de facto leader, and a samesexer himself. It can get violent, as we learnt when the Hummers lost Pallasport in the Asteroid Belt about ten years ago, and the riot almost wrecked the habitat, which would have killed hundreds of thousands. Dao’s partner, Len Hue Zhang, was charged with all that. The data records were scrambled, and he got off on a technicality- the great hulking thug.

Happily, the last elections almost wiped out Hummer support outside Mars, except for Terran pockets like Moscow, Warsaw, Teheran, Dallas and Brisbane. Unhappily, apart from reasonably liberal New Shanghai, most of Mars is solidly Hummer.

So, is there intelligent life on Mars? Reader, I leave that to you to judge…