Ooh! One More Babylon 5 Observation

I was thinking about the mysterious gravity rings that the Imani ambassador uses to squeeze (literally) a committment out of G'Kar in the pilot, and it occurred to me that all five of the major races essentially play by the same rules. With the exception of the Vorlons, they're all humanoids, and they can all tolerate one Earth gravity (and Earth atmosphere, again with the exception of the Vorlons, maybe). This is of course a concession to reality; CGI wasn't in existence back then, as I noted before, and you can't very well squeeze a human actor into an octopus suit and expect him to have emotional range.

But it brings up an interesting point. There's plenty of war between these five species, right? And all of them have expansionist policies, large empires and terraforming (or whatever-forming) capability. I was wondering why there was so much conflict, and one of the possible explanations could be that they're all after the same real estate. We don't know much about their instantaneous warp technologies yet, or the borders of the various empires, but it's entirely possible that one or more of the empires is running out of living space/resources and needs these prime terraforming candidates. And since everyone's looking for the same type of planet, well...

Another explanation could be that terraformed planets can be used by anybody, since their requirements are about the same. As soon as your rival has invested a ton of money and time in Varn-forming a planet, you swoop in and seize it from them. Their investment is gone, you've hurt their expansion efforts and gained a new world for yourself at little cost--until and unless they strike back, that is.

This is all speculation at this point, but it's interesting speculation. This show is making me think, and that's a quality I treasure on television.

Picture is unrelated.