July 20th was the 45th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. I vaguely remember watching it on a black and white television set at my mother's urging, not realizing the import of what happened.
Now, looking back in hindsight, I remember being fascinated with astronomy and science fiction UFOs and ancient aliens even at that early age, perhaps prefiguring my desire to escape the mundane world. I even told my parents, much to their horror, after watching the made-for-tv movie about the famous Betty and Barney Hill UFO abduction with Estelle Parsons and James Earl Jones that if a UFO descended, I would say, “Take me away!”
And then I remember reading astronomy books from the 1950s which predicted by the year 2000 we would be living on Mars or Venus or in floating space colonies. (Hasn't happened ... and let's not get into flying cars on The Jetsons.)
We've landed on the moon, one of the Voyagers is now outside the solar system, and there was an article about prediction by NASA that we will find alien life on planets with earthlike conditions in about twenty years.
I've often wondered if such a discover may transform even further our views about sexuality. Now most sci fi sex (at least the type I remember) is pretty much pumpedup heterosexual sex in revealing costumes. Think Barbarella. Or Captain Kirk fucking every beautiful stacked cosmic computer priestess on the original Star Trek.
And now that we are discovering that sexuality exists on a complex spectrum that doesn't conform to traditional or heteronormative gender binaries, perhaps we could hypothesize that life on other planets is just as diverse sexually.
Could a planet's ecosystem have developed three sexes? Or perhaps like the sea horse, males carry children and give birth? Or, and this would really be breaking boundaries, perhaps one planet thrives on some kind of interspecies sex?
(Remember, that's how Spock came to be!)