In Alien rebel, Titan is a world with native life. Different lipids (fats and related molecules) fill the functions that proteins, DNA and RNA fill in Earth life. In this low temperature lipid-active biochemistry, methane fill the role of water. The energy comes from reacting acetylene with hydrogen in a process accelerated by various catalysts, generating methane as a waste product.
There is native intelligent life on Alien rebel Titan. After the arrival of astronauts from Earth, who establish closed heat-insulated and oxygenated habitats on Titan, an exchange of ideas between the two intelligent species takes place.
However, the United Nations later send space troops to Titan to enforce Earth law there. They start treating the intelligent Titanians as animals, including euthanasia without consent against those Titanians believed by veterinaries from Earth to suffer. The Titanians form a resistance against this, destroying those human habitats in which euthanasia-related veterinaries dwell. They adopt the slogan "No euthanasia without consent!". Soon, Titan is thrown into full civil war.
Some of the humans sympathize with the alien resistance. One of them, a young woman who volunteered to the United Nations troops under the assumed identity of Sophia Schiapparelli to hide her politically suspect background of her true name Anne McGregor (she became an anarchist after her younger brother fell to his death from a burning multi-stories house and the fireman was too afraid of being falsely accused of sex abuse to dare catch him in his fall), secretly leaked intelligence information from the United Nations to the Titanians.
Another human sympathizer with the Titanian revolt, an engineer named Pierre Montgomery who was among the pre-UN troop astronauts on Titan, did much of the scientific argumentation. He argued, based on his own insect-inspired biomimetic robots, that since energy-cheap mechanisms could generate empathic behavior, the entire psychiatric view of empathy as complex mechanisms was nonsense. Therefore, he said, it was right to respect the will of Titanians to live even in cases when law considered it to be cruelty to animals. He also later added that since the model of empathy evolutionarily extending from parental care predicted that empathy with one's own species (to which one's offspring belongs) should be a necessary but not sufficient condition for empathy with other species and not vice versa, the biologistic model could not be soundly modified to consider all people who were "cruel" to animals to be violent to other people while some people who were ruthless to other people could be caring to animals. Instead, Pierre Montgomery argued for a sociological stigmatization model of psychiatry-inspired assumptions causing violence in people stamped as "violent".
The revolt is successful, and Titanians free themselves of Earth law. Some sympathizing humans stay in heated and oxygenated habitats on Titan. Humans from Earth who sympathize with neo-Titanian substance over formality society even move to Titan to join. After the mutually assured destruction by asteroid control is established, the Solar System is divided into two civilizations: one substance-based multi-species in the Outer Solar System and one formality-based one-species in the Inner Solar System.