I hear a Babylon 5 reboot is in the works

[CharlesPhipps]

True.

Albeit we know that he IS A prophecized savior in the literal sense because he's one of the Three in One. It's just the prophecy that speaks of Sheridan's rise to becoming the hero that will end the war with the Shadows is due to technology. But we have actual technology mages in the setting too.

I guess I'm very fond of how deep into fantasy tropes Babylon Five goes while still retaining the veneer of plausible scifi (psychics aside).

[Frustration]

Alas, one of the things in SF that really gets my goat is when they use humanly-intuitive concepts as a substitute for incomprehensible futuristic science, like when B5 has "life force" be extractable and transferrable. Vitalism is dead, and it died hard, because it makes intuitive sense to human beings despite being 100% wrong. But it keeps being used in shows ranging from B5 to Stargate: Atlantis to I don't know how many movies.

Actual physics keeps getting more and more inhuman and difficult to understand the further it progresses. It's not going to turn back into Aristotelian Four-Element theory, or Vitalism, or evil spirits causing disease!

[CharlesPhipps]

Alas, one of the things in SF that really gets my goat is when they use humanly-intuitive concepts as a substitute for incomprehensible futuristic science, like when B5 has "life force" be extractable and transferrable. Vitalism is dead, and it died hard, because it makes intuitive sense to human beings despite being 100% wrong. But it keeps being used in shows ranging from B5 to Stargate: Atlantis to I don't know how many movies.

Actual physics keeps getting more and more inhuman and difficult to understand the further it progresses. It's not going to turn back into Aristotelian Four-Element theory, or Vitalism, or evil spirits causing disease!

I'm not sure it's a human-ly intuitive idea versus just an idea. It makes a story more interesting to have an 'equivalent exchange' machine.

Not because it makes any sort of sense.

[Riedquat]

Alas, one of the things in SF that really gets my goat is when they use humanly-intuitive concepts as a substitute for incomprehensible futuristic science, like when B5 has "life force" be extractable and transferrable. Vitalism is dead, and it died hard, because it makes intuitive sense to human beings despite being 100% wrong. But it keeps being used in shows ranging from B5 to Stargate: Atlantis to I don't know how many movies.

Actual physics keeps getting more and more inhuman and difficult to understand the further it progresses. It's not going to turn back into Aristotelian Four-Element theory, or Vitalism, or evil spirits causing disease!

I'm not sure it's a human-ly intuitive idea versus just an idea. It makes a story more interesting to have an 'equivalent exchange' machine.

Not because it makes any sort of sense.

But it does make suspension of disbelief a bit harder when you've got the equivalent of a machine that'll make a clapped out old banger run nicely by transferring over the newness of the shiny new car parked next to it.

[Frustration]

The real problem is that, for the machine to work, there must be something special about living beings (specifically, sapient ones) that is fundamentally distinct from the matter making them up. It's a theme JMS keeps returning to: he doesn't believe in gods, but he does seem to believe in souls. (See the episode with Deathwalker, and the canonical explanation for why the Shadows put kidnapped members of the lesser races in their ships, or the origin of technomage implants.)

From a scientific point of view, it's incredibly frustrating.

[Riedquat]

The real problem is that, for the machine to work, there must be something special about living beings (specifically, sapient ones) that is fundamentally distinct from the matter making them up. It's a theme JMS keeps returning to: he doesn't believe in gods, but he does seem to believe in souls. (See the episode with Deathwalker, and the canonical explanation for why the Shadows put kidnapped members of the lesser races in their ships, or the origin of technomage implants.)

From a scientific point of view, it's incredibly frustrating.

It can work if established early on as part of that universe. Trek has its mind melds, Star Wars has the Force and so on. Any appearance of anything related though should look like it is part of what has been established for that universe as an exception to reality rather than pretending to be part of science. Well, up to a point anyway, things like FTL travel and artificial gravity we generally accept as falling on the "fake science" side without much annoyance.

[hammerofglass]

In Babylon 5 souls are explicitly a real thing that technology can interact with. Soulhunters can trap them, Minbari can scientifically show someone is a reincarnation of a specific person. We actually see a few on screen at the end of the very second episode.

[CharlesPhipps]

In Babylon 5 souls are explicitly a real thing that technology can interact with. Soulhunters can trap them, Minbari can scientifically show someone is a reincarnation of a specific person. We actually see a few on screen at the end of the very second episode.

JMS was fucking with the audience to an extent, though. The Mimbari believe in reincarnation and they have "proof" because Valen's soul is identified as having been somehow inside Sinclair. Except, we know there's another reason for that.

[McAvoy]

In Babylon 5 souls are explicitly a real thing that technology can interact with. Soulhunters can trap them, Minbari can scientifically show someone is a reincarnation of a specific person. We actually see a few on screen at the end of the very second episode.

JMS was fucking with the audience to an extent, though. The Mimbari believe in reincarnation and they have "proof" because Valen's soul is identified as having been somehow inside Sinclair. Except, we know there's another reason for that.

You can always assume that device also is designed to read a person's genetic makeup in a super fast way and it's programmed only to read Sinclair's/Valen's genetics. Could be very well Vorlon in its origin.

[hammerofglass]

Wasn't the triluminary they used a temporal paradox too? Like they got them from Valen but he got them by taking them with him into the past?