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Mars was the first to be terraformed, and compared to those that followed, it was very easy. Early on the decision was made to proceed as quickly as possible. Thousands of explosions were set off in the regolith (it was said this would help the Martian life-forms buried in the lithosphere), and much of the surface of the planet was burned, in lines that later served as beds for the planet’s famous canals. The burning created an atmosphere, and the planet’s ice was mined and melted such that a narrow northern ocean and a Hellas Sea were filled. Little to no regard was taken for the primordial surface, and yet it was also true that the vertical scale of the planet’s topography protected the highest parts of the landscape from much alteration, leaving it as a kind of primeval park a mass influx of immigrants from Earth quickly melded into a polyglot community that within two generations thought of itself as intrinsically and fundamentally Martian, Homo ares, and as such, a political unit independent of Earth by nature and by right. The entire population agreed to secede from all Terran associations, afterward reorganizing under a new constitution that stipulated a single planetary government and an economic system variously labeled socialist, communist, utopian, democratic-state-anarchic, syndicalist, worker cooperative, libertarian socialist, and any number of other labels from the past, all of which were rejected by Martian political theorists, who preferred the adjective “martian” or “areological.” As a new socioeconomic system with a newly created biosphere to work in, Mars was a socio-physical power the equal of any single Earth nation or alliance and in many ways, because of its unity, the equal of all the rest of balkanized humanity combined fears were stoked when Mars in the first flush of independence began to strip the nitrogen from Titan’s atmosphere for return to Mars, without regard for the opinions of the people already in the Saturn system, admittedly few in number. Around this same time (2176–2196), Chinese teams dismantled Saturn’s moon Dione in order to redirect it to Venus as part of the initial terraformation there. In the disruption on Earth following the Little Ice Age of the 2140s, there was no power on Earth large enough to challenge the Chinese over this distant move. But these two events around Saturn together stimulated the creation of the Saturn League, which over time managed to assert sovereignty over the whole Saturn system-although it is true that the threat of a traumatic Saturn-Mars war, Saturn’s phantom war of independence, as some called it-was needed to finalize the assertion

Earth’s moon, Luna, never achieved independence, but was always divided into cities and regions controlled by various Terran powers. It would have been difficult to fully terraform Luna in any case, because hitting it with asteroids to spin it and give it an atmosphere was considered too likely to subject Earth to a tektite rain of potentially great severity. It was also true that metals and useful chemicals in lunar rock could be mined only by a deep strip-mining and processing of much of the lunar surface, which also made terraforming difficult. So large domed craters and tented areas alternated with cosmologically large mining pits, and each nation with a substantial lunar presence had an influx of raw materials. China’s early investment on Luna led directly to its influence over Venus, because the Venus sunshield was a product of the lunar Chinese industrial bases. At the same time many other Terran nations established lunar bases, and the political unification of Luna became impossible. Some locate the origins of the Balkanization to this development, although most see qubical decoherence and the sheer size of the solar system as the key balkanization is of course the subject of great disagreement, with judgments of it ranging from its being the newly lowest circle of hell to its representing the delectable and fructifying diversification of life in our time success is failure. The Accelerando spread all the weakness, disease, and crime embedded in the Terran system of that era, and once spread that widely, they could never be contained. Pandora’s box had been by the beginning of the twenty-fourth century the Mondragon Accord had organized a third force to join the Earth-Mars dyad, and the Jovian and Saturnian leagues provided major counterweights as well. A situation of this much diplomatic complexity brought back talk of a “balance of powers,” of the “great game,” of a “cold war,” and so on: all ideas from earlier eras, again haunting us as they have a wont to do, hungry ghosts deceiving us with their false analogies, laying their dead hands on our living eyes! Ultimately the Balkanization was by its scope and special nature a new thing