What's your rewatching thoughts?

[Galahad]

It's an interesting one. My mind is not made up:

On the one hand it makes perfect sense to scuttle the Solar System in order to prevent all technologies getting into wrong hands (after all Sleeping in Light is somewhat of a precedent).

However, as an enlightened species at this point (and we even have these principles to a degree now), why would we destroy a diverse ecosystem that sustains plenty of other lifeforms? That would be just selfish! OK so the Great Burn may have wiped out a lot of it... but I would imagine that the Rangers would have been rebuilding the Earth's ecology as much as they were rebuilding it's technology.

If we destroy the Earth to prevent younger races taking advantage, and yet are acting as custodians to the younger races yet to come... it's hardly an auspicious start. It's effectively committing evolutionary genocide.

I don't believe we'd leave life behind to die unneccesarily. So either we found a new system and terraformed the ecology to sustain the creatures from our soon to be destroyed homeworld, or we terraformed Vorlon to suit the needs of our own ecosystem... or there is an element of us legging it after all.

My instinct says that we scuttled the Earth but preserved it's ecology elsewhere.

 

[A_M_Swallow]

The humans have moved on mass to the vorlon homeworld. Something had to trigger that. We would not just move for the sake of moving, unless something was happening which would threaten our very existance.

If we were destroying any chance of anyone else getting their hands on technology why not just destroy earth?

Typical JMS to leave more questions than answers.

Our technology would be all over the Moon, Mars and asteroids. An energy based life form could live on Venus and probably likes swimming in the thick gases of Saturn. Exploding the sun may be the simplest way of destroying the lot.

 

[vorlonlovechild]

If you destroyed the sun - and thus all the planets around it, you would also alter the gravitational structure of this area of our galaxy. To me it makes no sense to destroy the sun to prevent anyone getting their hands on technology. Just destroy the technology, or empty the planet leaving no trace. If we've a presense on other planets / asteroids then the same would apply. Remove any trace of our presense before we leave.

Awfully arrogant of our species to wipe out an entire solar system just because we are afraid another race may benefit from our tech.

Oh hang on a minute. The guy was a ranger.

Is there a possibility the Rangers engineered the Human move to Vorlon by forcing it on them?

 

[Trollheart]

I must admit when I watched this originally (and again, just now) I always assumed, perhaps naively, that the sun was going nova of its own accord. I know it's not supposed to do so for billions of years, but perhaps something happened to speed that process up? Were the Mayans right?

Never even countenanced the idea that humanity (or whatever we had evolved into by then) would total the
sun themselves. Surely not?

 

[Galahad]

I must admit when I watched this originally (and again, just now) I always assumed, perhaps naively, that the sun was going nova of its own accord. I know it's not supposed to do so for billions of years, but perhaps something happened to speed that process up? Were the Mayans right?

Never even countenanced the idea that humanity (or whatever we had evolved into by then) would total the
sun themselves. Surely not?

JMS himself infers that Sol's destruction is artificially induced (when asked the question he cited the fact that the solar emissions are mentioned as being atypical and that it could be caused by opening jump points within it's core to reduce the star's mass)

 

[Trollheart]

Well --- as they probably said in the 40s --- whaddya know about that?

 

[RandyS]

When I rewatch B5, I have no thoughts... I let my mind become a blank slate - the Zen of watching B5 takes over.

That's pretty much how I feel, but then I have no thoughts most of the time.