Excuse me jumping in bu wasn't that from before they station's defenses were upgraded? If I recall correctly the station originally was very lightly defended and was only upgraded when the Marines showed up. After that it could take out capital ships including a Centauri cruiser and Earth Force ships.MightyDavidson wrote: ↑Sun Oct 13, 2019 3:04 am Also if the humanoid aliens had been planning to murder us all, they'd have just done it with little to no effort on their part. The Minbari nearly did it already and the Centauri are even more capable of it, as evidenced by how easily one Centauri ship overwhelmed B5's defenses.
Babylon 5 being a diplomatic and trade station first and foremost rather then a warship or combat station is a poor barometer for how a war between the Centauri and Earth would go.
If I remember correctly the Centauri and Earth were about par in strength, the Minbari on the other had were the strongest race aside from the old races.
More on topic, I think its a real mistake to humanize the Centauri even if the look the most human, even more human then the kinda related Minbari. They are not human, Earth is not some lost Centauri colony despite what they Centauri would have you believe. They are aliens in every sense of the word, alien history, alien values, alien biology, alien way of thinking.
Even human societies here on Earth will have very different societies from each other when they develop in isolation of each other and we are the same species on the same planet. To take the example from this thread, societies had and still do arranged marriages here on Earth, an alien and abhorrent concept to most people nowadays in western society but very very common in the past of the west and in current other cultures. Thats just humies only separated by an ocean or two or a century or so of time.
Just because the Centauri look like us doesn't mean they are anything like us anymore then because the Narn look so different they should be completely and utterly alien to us. One could make the argument that Narn are more alike to humanity then the Centauri both societal and personality wise, their society is multi-religious, has a government made of elites in society who worked their way to that position rather then inheriting it, and showed traits that humans value like courage and self sacrifice. Might look more alien then the Centauri but at times might act more human.
To bring that tired old metaphor out of its retirement home, don't judge a book by its cover. Just because something looks safe and familiar doesn't mean it is, look at the difference between the cape buffalo and the water buffalo. They look almost identical but the former is considered one of the most dangerous animals in Africa while the latter is heavily domesticated, completely docile like a cow and filling the same role, even looks a bit like a cow. But completely different behavior between the two of them despite looking so similar.
