Except that the franchise used to have depth and technobabble. Serious social issues were explored in an entertaining way. The current reboot is basically devoid of that depth.
Actually to be truly fair, all of the Star Trek series varied tremendously in depth and quality. Quite a few of those episodes in all of the Trek series were quite frankly, awful. Awful in the terms of science, of story, and of characterization.
Trek's popularity had nothing to do with it's science, it's actors, nor it's authors, because there were other shows that did better in all three. The secret of Trek's success was twofold, 1. It was created in an era of unequaled optimism and promise and 2. It was a show that allowed many to project what they were looking for in vision.
You are kidding right? he had a fricking TIME MACHINE and he doesn't go to warn everybody, maybe give them plenty of time to move, nope he goes to blow up the federation?
He did not have a "time machine" what he had was an accidental one way trip into the past courtesy of a spawned singularity. He had twenty years to fester his anger against a Federation that failed to save his world and even more so, a Vulcan that refused to try. So no.... that wasn't an open option. With nothing left to live for, his only option is rage.
.... that in the days before the IPad and Android tablets, there WERE tablets that were being sold in stores such as CompUSA and Best Buy and others. And these were tablets that were essentially scrunched down laptops, even to the inclusion of the occaisonal keyboard.
.
.And what did most of the units do.....? Gather dust as they lay unsold on bins. As relatedm there may be about 5 or ten people where the tablet as scrunched down laptop was a perfectly viable solution.
.
.For the bulk of the market however these units were an absolute failure in terms of the user experience, so much so that most folks had written off the tablet as of being any good for anything other than a few specialised users.
.
.And then came iOS and Android, UI's organised around touch, and the recognition is that the primary purpose of a tablet is that of a third space, a unit for consumption of data and content, rather than creation. It's this revelation and revolution alone which made tablets into the force they are today.
that little business of required tensile strength on the order of the binding force of atomic nucleons seems pesky, besides needing to convert many masses of 20 jupiters to energy to spin it up (or harnessing the total output of the sun for centuries)
I didn't say either was easy. But at least it has a basis in physics instead of relying on non-existent gravity generators. If you don't have those, than you have to spin the Sphere as well.
Seriously, with as litigious as everyone is, who WOULDN'T patent every thing they could think of, if only to keep "the other guy" from litigating you to oblivion?
Not that I'm saying Samsung won't exploit such patents. I'm sure they can, and will. But that's how the game is played, so instead of getting riled at Samsung ( or Apple, or anyone else for that matter ) for suing everyone for absurd patents, shouldn't we, instead, be outraged at the system that allows and encourages such behavior?
Remember Apple started playing this game when someone sued THEM for one of those niggling patents on the iPhone. Knowing that their phone was going to be a big ticket item, they really did not have any choice but to play this game... No one, not Samsung, Google, Microsoft, whoever does.
A big-boom drive is dependent on the number of nukes it can carry
No, it's really not (at least not in the sense you mean). It's only limited by the amount of relevant raw materials you have on hand (there are no limitations on weight or size with this kind of drive), and no other (currently achievable) propulsion tech can match the thrust/power of a nuclear pulse rocket. In other words: the same limitations apply to an ion drive (which is limited by the power-generating facilities you carry on board, and no, solar power won't work in INTERSTELLAR travel) without the other advantages.
An Orion drive won't work for interstellar travel either, not to any practical sense. You simply can't carry enough explosives to accelerate to any usable fraction of C. Quite frankly, interstellar travel does not really seem to be an option for biological man.
The Earth-Sun L2 point is out of reach with the old Space Shuttle, but the original point is a good one. It is too bad that we do not have the capability to repair and restock the consumables on spacecraft in the inner Solar System. It has been nearly 45 years since we first went to the Moon. We should be able to move around in our band of the Solar System by now.
Technology doesn't change physics. It's highly unlikely that space travel will ever be the casual affair that air travel is now.
If only we had a plan for recurring orbital missions... A "space pickup" that would launch on a regular basis to make pit stops for things like extra helium.
To think how many multi-decade projects like this will "rot on the vine".
The Herschel Space Observatory is 1,500,000 km away at a Lagrangian point. Servicing missions of any kind are out of the question.
Given how far away Herschel is, it would be more economical to simply send up a new one, than a manned mission to service it.
Look up Project Orion. It turns out that making that kind of shock absorber is actually quite technically feasible. Somewhat ironically, riding to orbit on a stream of nuclear fireballs is a lot simpler than how we're doing it now. One big advantage is that you are no longer mass-limited and so you don't need to make as many compromises to the system design to keep things light.
Since then, Mr. Dyson no longer thinks it's a good idea to explode a a bunch of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere.
The fuck, man? Posting a story that 700-some idiots paid actual money to have a chance to give an exoplanet a non-official name and pretending like it means something?
You had your chance: You made it to the closest easiest target, but then parked your waste-holes for over 40 stellar orbits. Had you shown promise, been prodigiously diligent or at least sensible enough to expend the small cultural effort to develop the tech to colonize beyond your planet's safe magnetosphere then maybe things would have worked out differently for you... The Universe has neither love nor sympathy for lazy complacent races such as yours.
"Cold, dead hands" -- Ha! They might as well be for all the good you've done with them.
Actually the Universe has neither love nor sympathy for anyone, whether lazy, or competent. Sometimes extremely fit species are laid low, and extremely silly ones are preserved through nothing more significant than blind luck.
At least Pluto is in lockstep with Neptune, and thus clearly belong in the solar system. Eris moves almost twice the distance away from Neptune, at a 45 degree angle to the ecliptic (more than twice that of Pluto). That's not what I'd think of as planetary motion.
As I understand it, being in "lockstep" with another planet is not part of the scientific definition of planethood. If it were, then we'd have some problems. Anything that orbits the Sun is by definition, a "proper member of the solar system." The thing here is about differentiating all these "proper" members into more useful divisions. Neither Pluto, nor Eris have cleared out the areas bordering their orbits. While they are circular bodies, numbers alone have demonstrated that that by itself would result in the solar system having thousands of "planets", with the conventional planets Mercury to Neptune, now being designated as the "freaks" of the lot.
The recognized standards body is the International Astronomical Union and their policy is:
Exoplanets
In 2009, the Organizing Committee of IAU Commission 53 Extrasolar Planets (WGESP) on exoplanets discussed the possibility of giving popular names to exoplanets in addition to their existing catalogue designation (for instance HD 85512 b). Although no consensus was reached, the majority was not in favour of this possibility at the time.
However, considering the ever increasing interest of the general public in being involved in the discovery and understanding of the Universe, the IAU decided in 2013 to restart the discussion of the naming procedure for exoplanets and assess the need to have popular names as well. In 2013 the members of Commission 53 will be consulted in this respect and the result of this will be made public on this page.
This is just a company click-baiting by holding naming contests, they have no official standing whatsoever. Is this more dice.com crap?
Was this started by the public wish of one of the discoverers of remote ice dwarfs beyond Pluto to have his discovery named Xena?
Maybe an American will finally discover an actual planet one day. Everyone else already has.
Everyone? You can't really count the visible planets, or if you do, then every American is descended from an ethnic group that "discovered" them. As to the Extra Saturnian Planets, Uranus was discovered by an Englishman, and Neptune's discovery was the collaborative result of two Frenchmen, an actual telespcope guy and a mathematician who gave out the clues of where to look. That's hardly everyone.
Pluto's demotion was the result of the fact that up to now, the only definition of "planet" was the non-scientific one of "wanderer in the sky". Any scientific definition that would have kept Pluto as designated a planet would have immediately ballooned the number planets in the solarystem to over thirty, potentially thousands, with the majority of planets being bodies smaller than the Moon, and little more than dirty snowballs.
"Because an American discovered it." is not a valid reason to not move science forward in this area. It should also be noted that Pluto did not fit the criteria for success for answering the question that originally inspired the search, correcting perceived anomalies in Neptune's orbit. Discrepancies by the way which have been resolved as being observational errors of the time, and an incorrect figure for Neptune's mass which was refined by the Voyager flyby.
Pluto is not even the most massive dwarf planet, that honor going to the recently named Eris. It does bear the honor of being the signatory body of a new class of solary system body, the Ice Dwarf.
If Clyde Tombaugh's living descendants can accept the name change with dignity and grace, (they even gave a warm welcome to Nat History's Dr. Tyson who made the issue public by taking Pluto out of his Hall of Planets,), I would hope that any person who puts science in front of national breast-beating would as well.
Einstein sort of took care of that. Mercury is deep enough in the Sun's gravity well that the Newtonian discrepancies which would support the existence of Vulcan are explained away by the curvature of space-time.
Which option do you believe should be researched first: gas core reactor rocket engines or thermonuclear rocket engines?
While the gas core technology is simpler and would allow practical interplanetary flight within the Solar System, shouldn't we (the Humankind) research first the thermonuclear rocket engines technology that would make interstellar flight feasible?
Thanks in advance!
There's really not much point in going to other star systems without a practical method of traveling to the planets within them. It would be like building the Starship Enterprise without a working transporter or shuttlecraft system.
Do you have any opinion on Larry Niven's Ringworld concept? It does seem to have the dual advantage of requiring less exotic techniques such as not requiring gravity generators, (although formidable enginerring problems remain), and seems overall less claustrophobic.
There are other forces at work besides gravity. The star has a solar wind. If you have countless small intelligent devices poised out at the place where gravity and the solar wind cancel, and these devices are dynamically connected through a variety of energies and forces including EMR including lasers and possibly masers further back, and the collective gravitational force they all exert on one another, It would seem to me a nonsolid shell of computational matter could effectively envelope a star, absorb most of it's energy and use some of that energy to maintain it's relative position around that star. It is an interesting questions.
The terms you use are interesting and entertainng but are in a scientific sense not much more than blowing air. (or bytes if you will) On a non solid shell, what you are going to stand on.? Making something of computaitonal matter has no meaning outside of an old Dr. Who episode. And EMR is generally used as a term regarding the long term effects of your computer monitor. Fact is the shell needs gravity to be useful, or at least a downward force if your trees, water, people, and buildings aren't just going to float off. So you have two choices.
1. Build gravity generators all over the place using some science that doesn't exist yet and hope to heaven not ONE of them fails, otherwise you're dealing with a tornado of horrific proportions as the air blows inward. 1.a. BTW gravity doesn't cancel the solar wind. The solar wind from Sol for instance, pushes all the way out pass Pluto until it's outward pressure diminishes to the point where it no longer pushes back interstellar matter. It's only now at this point that the Pioneers and Voyagers that were sent out on escape trajectories are starting to penetrate the bow shock.
2. Spin the whole works and deal with both the centripetal force that would be working to pull it apart and the sloughing of matter towards the equator. That's why Ringworlds are much more elegant and workable, and less claustrophobic solutions than Dyson Spheres.
While space travel is important for human survival in the long term, the more I think about it, the more it seems that developing a human style, scalable, artificial intelligence has for more potential to provide humans with rapid access to a much larger set of useful answers in the general domain of practical, solvable problems.
The investment should be, relatively speaking, trivial, and we already have 7 billion or so working models, so I think it's fairly certain that this can be done.
Given a choice, would you advocate more resources be allocated to space travel, or AI?
I hear there's this computer called Deep Thought... programmed by a bunch of mice.
There's still one major problem with Dyson spheres....
Gravity.. or the lack of same. Given that we don't have a science that gives us gravity generators, we're kind of short on ways of making it work. Sure you can spin the thing, but all that does is throw all the free matter down to the equator and that comes with it's own set of problems.
Given that as it may, what do you think of Larry Niven's Ringworld as an alternative? Take a band of funky made matter,, spin it fast enough to give you gravity, and put walls on the edges to keep the atmosphere from falling down the sides. And a ring of shadow squares to give you day and night cycles. Sure the orbit would need continual maintenance and adjustment, but at least you'd be able to see out.
I think Sheldon's hate of Babylon 5 is a way for the writer's to pimp a show that wasn't as mainstream recongized. And give it some recognition.
It's Sheldon who is established as a person with absolutely no taste for culture. If he disses a show, that generally means it's a show worth watching.
JMS didnt actually write that episode. It was Neil Gaiman (American Gods, Anansi Boys). But I wonder how much input JMS had on it as producer.
Still, my money would have been on Susan's brother, Gany, and he would have given her back the diamond earing she gave him.
Save however that being either a temporal doppelganger, psycho induced illusion, or a ghost, that would not have been an option.
B5 with the exception of this story has actually always been ambivalent about the supernatural. They always tended to give a scientific explanation for what seemed tgo be supernatural events and this might not be an exception. Perhaps nothing more happened than illusions being projected into the minds of the folks who were "visited' within the designated sector of the station.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that the franchise used to have depth and technobabble. Serious social issues were explored in an entertaining way. The current reboot is basically devoid of that depth.
Actually to be truly fair, all of the Star Trek series varied tremendously in depth and quality. Quite a few of those episodes in all of the Trek series were quite frankly, awful. Awful in the terms of science, of story, and of characterization. Trek's popularity had nothing to do with it's science, it's actors, nor it's authors, because there were other shows that did better in all three. The secret of Trek's success was twofold, 1. It was created in an era of unequaled optimism and promise and 2. It was a show that allowed many to project what they were looking for in vision.
You are kidding right? he had a fricking TIME MACHINE and he doesn't go to warn everybody, maybe give them plenty of time to move, nope he goes to blow up the federation?
He did not have a "time machine" what he had was an accidental one way trip into the past courtesy of a spawned singularity. He had twenty years to fester his anger against a Federation that failed to save his world and even more so, a Vulcan that refused to try. So no.... that wasn't an open option. With nothing left to live for, his only option is rage.
.... that in the days before the IPad and Android tablets, there WERE tablets that were being sold in stores such as CompUSA and Best Buy and others. And these were tablets that were essentially scrunched down laptops, even to the inclusion of the occaisonal keyboard.
.
.And what did most of the units do.....? Gather dust as they lay unsold on bins. As relatedm there may be about 5 or ten people where the tablet as scrunched down laptop was a perfectly viable solution.
.
.For the bulk of the market however these units were an absolute failure in terms of the user experience, so much so that most folks had written off the tablet as of being any good for anything other than a few specialised users.
.
.And then came iOS and Android, UI's organised around touch, and the recognition is that the primary purpose of a tablet is that of a third space, a unit for consumption of data and content, rather than creation. It's this revelation and revolution alone which made tablets into the force they are today.
.
America, it really looks like your only hope is Google Fiber.
Given the limited reach and aims of Google, it's not much of a hope.
that little business of required tensile strength on the order of the binding force of atomic nucleons seems pesky, besides needing to convert many masses of 20 jupiters to energy to spin it up (or harnessing the total output of the sun for centuries)
I didn't say either was easy. But at least it has a basis in physics instead of relying on non-existent gravity generators. If you don't have those, than you have to spin the Sphere as well.
Seriously, with as litigious as everyone is, who WOULDN'T patent every thing they could think of, if only to keep "the other guy" from litigating you to oblivion?
Not that I'm saying Samsung won't exploit such patents. I'm sure they can, and will. But that's how the game is played, so instead of getting riled at Samsung ( or Apple, or anyone else for that matter ) for suing everyone for absurd patents, shouldn't we, instead, be outraged at the system that allows and encourages such behavior?
Remember Apple started playing this game when someone sued THEM for one of those niggling patents on the iPhone. Knowing that their phone was going to be a big ticket item, they really did not have any choice but to play this game... No one, not Samsung, Google, Microsoft, whoever does.
A big-boom drive is dependent on the number of nukes it can carry
No, it's really not (at least not in the sense you mean). It's only limited by the amount of relevant raw materials you have on hand (there are no limitations on weight or size with this kind of drive), and no other (currently achievable) propulsion tech can match the thrust/power of a nuclear pulse rocket. In other words: the same limitations apply to an ion drive (which is limited by the power-generating facilities you carry on board, and no, solar power won't work in INTERSTELLAR travel) without the other advantages.
An Orion drive won't work for interstellar travel either, not to any practical sense. You simply can't carry enough explosives to accelerate to any usable fraction of C. Quite frankly, interstellar travel does not really seem to be an option for biological man.
I don't think so. Ion drives are considerably more efficient, and I'm not sure how the shock absorber arrangement would hold up under prolonged use.
The Earth-Sun L2 point is out of reach with the old Space Shuttle, but the original point is a good one. It is too bad that we do not have the capability to repair and restock the consumables on spacecraft in the inner Solar System. It has been nearly 45 years since we first went to the Moon. We should be able to move around in our band of the Solar System by now.
Technology doesn't change physics. It's highly unlikely that space travel will ever be the casual affair that air travel is now.
If only we had a plan for recurring orbital missions... A "space pickup" that would launch on a regular basis to make pit stops for things like extra helium.
To think how many multi-decade projects like this will "rot on the vine".
The Herschel Space Observatory is 1,500,000 km away at a Lagrangian point. Servicing missions of any kind are out of the question.
Given how far away Herschel is, it would be more economical to simply send up a new one, than a manned mission to service it.
Look up Project Orion. It turns out that making that kind of shock absorber is actually quite technically feasible. Somewhat ironically, riding to orbit on a stream of nuclear fireballs is a lot simpler than how we're doing it now. One big advantage is that you are no longer mass-limited and so you don't need to make as many compromises to the system design to keep things light.
Since then, Mr. Dyson no longer thinks it's a good idea to explode a a bunch of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere.
The fuck, man? Posting a story that 700-some idiots paid actual money to have a chance to give an exoplanet a non-official name and pretending like it means something?
Is this Slashdot or is it Entertainment Weekly?
You mean there's a difference?
You had your chance: You made it to the closest easiest target, but then parked your waste-holes for over 40 stellar orbits. Had you shown promise, been prodigiously diligent or at least sensible enough to expend the small cultural effort to develop the tech to colonize beyond your planet's safe magnetosphere then maybe things would have worked out differently for you... The Universe has neither love nor sympathy for lazy complacent races such as yours.
"Cold, dead hands" -- Ha! They might as well be for all the good you've done with them.
Actually the Universe has neither love nor sympathy for anyone, whether lazy, or competent. Sometimes extremely fit species are laid low, and extremely silly ones are preserved through nothing more significant than blind luck.
.
At least Pluto is in lockstep with Neptune, and thus clearly belong in the solar system. Eris moves almost twice the distance away from Neptune, at a 45 degree angle to the ecliptic (more than twice that of Pluto). That's not what I'd think of as planetary motion.
As I understand it, being in "lockstep" with another planet is not part of the scientific definition of planethood. If it were, then we'd have some problems. Anything that orbits the Sun is by definition, a "proper member of the solar system." The thing here is about differentiating all these "proper" members into more useful divisions. Neither Pluto, nor Eris have cleared out the areas bordering their orbits. While they are circular bodies, numbers alone have demonstrated that that by itself would result in the solar system having thousands of "planets", with the conventional planets Mercury to Neptune, now being designated as the "freaks" of the lot.
The recognized standards body is the International Astronomical Union and their policy is:
Exoplanets In 2009, the Organizing Committee of IAU Commission 53 Extrasolar Planets (WGESP) on exoplanets discussed the possibility of giving popular names to exoplanets in addition to their existing catalogue designation (for instance HD 85512 b). Although no consensus was reached, the majority was not in favour of this possibility at the time.
However, considering the ever increasing interest of the general public in being involved in the discovery and understanding of the Universe, the IAU decided in 2013 to restart the discussion of the naming procedure for exoplanets and assess the need to have popular names as well. In 2013 the members of Commission 53 will be consulted in this respect and the result of this will be made public on this page.
This is just a company click-baiting by holding naming contests, they have no official standing whatsoever. Is this more dice.com crap?
Was this started by the public wish of one of the discoverers of remote ice dwarfs beyond Pluto to have his discovery named Xena?
Maybe an American will finally discover an actual planet one day. Everyone else already has.
Everyone? You can't really count the visible planets, or if you do, then every American is descended from an ethnic group that "discovered" them. As to the Extra Saturnian Planets, Uranus was discovered by an Englishman, and Neptune's discovery was the collaborative result of two Frenchmen, an actual telespcope guy and a mathematician who gave out the clues of where to look. That's hardly everyone.
Pluto's demotion was the result of the fact that up to now, the only definition of "planet" was the non-scientific one of "wanderer in the sky". Any scientific definition that would have kept Pluto as designated a planet would have immediately ballooned the number planets in the solarystem to over thirty, potentially thousands, with the majority of planets being bodies smaller than the Moon, and little more than dirty snowballs.
"Because an American discovered it." is not a valid reason to not move science forward in this area. It should also be noted that Pluto did not fit the criteria for success for answering the question that originally inspired the search, correcting perceived anomalies in Neptune's orbit. Discrepancies by the way which have been resolved as being observational errors of the time, and an incorrect figure for Neptune's mass which was refined by the Voyager flyby.
Pluto is not even the most massive dwarf planet, that honor going to the recently named Eris. It does bear the honor of being the signatory body of a new class of solary system body, the Ice Dwarf.
If Clyde Tombaugh's living descendants can accept the name change with dignity and grace, (they even gave a warm welcome to Nat History's Dr. Tyson who made the issue public by taking Pluto out of his Hall of Planets,), I would hope that any person who puts science in front of national breast-beating would as well.
We've already got a Vulcan. And it's closer than that.
Einstein sort of took care of that. Mercury is deep enough in the Sun's gravity well that the Newtonian discrepancies which would support the existence of Vulcan are explained away by the curvature of space-time.
Hello, professor Dyson.
Which option do you believe should be researched first: gas core reactor rocket engines or thermonuclear rocket engines? While the gas core technology is simpler and would allow practical interplanetary flight within the Solar System, shouldn't we (the Humankind) research first the thermonuclear rocket engines technology that would make interstellar flight feasible? Thanks in advance!
There's really not much point in going to other star systems without a practical method of traveling to the planets within them. It would be like building the Starship Enterprise without a working transporter or shuttlecraft system.
Did your son ever write a sequel to The Starship and the Canoe?
Do you have any opinion on Larry Niven's Ringworld concept? It does seem to have the dual advantage of requiring less exotic techniques such as not requiring gravity generators, (although formidable enginerring problems remain), and seems overall less claustrophobic.
There are other forces at work besides gravity. The star has a solar wind. If you have countless small intelligent devices poised out at the place where gravity and the solar wind cancel, and these devices are dynamically connected through a variety of energies and forces including EMR including lasers and possibly masers further back, and the collective gravitational force they all exert on one another, It would seem to me a nonsolid shell of computational matter could effectively envelope a star, absorb most of it's energy and use some of that energy to maintain it's relative position around that star. It is an interesting questions.
The terms you use are interesting and entertainng but are in a scientific sense not much more than blowing air. (or bytes if you will) On a non solid shell, what you are going to stand on.? Making something of computaitonal matter has no meaning outside of an old Dr. Who episode. And EMR is generally used as a term regarding the long term effects of your computer monitor. Fact is the shell needs gravity to be useful, or at least a downward force if your trees, water, people, and buildings aren't just going to float off. So you have two choices.
1. Build gravity generators all over the place using some science that doesn't exist yet and hope to heaven not ONE of them fails, otherwise you're dealing with a tornado of horrific proportions as the air blows inward. 1.a. BTW gravity doesn't cancel the solar wind. The solar wind from Sol for instance, pushes all the way out pass Pluto until it's outward pressure diminishes to the point where it no longer pushes back interstellar matter. It's only now at this point that the Pioneers and Voyagers that were sent out on escape trajectories are starting to penetrate the bow shock.
2. Spin the whole works and deal with both the centripetal force that would be working to pull it apart and the sloughing of matter towards the equator. That's why Ringworlds are much more elegant and workable, and less claustrophobic solutions than Dyson Spheres.
While space travel is important for human survival in the long term, the more I think about it, the more it seems that developing a human style, scalable, artificial intelligence has for more potential to provide humans with rapid access to a much larger set of useful answers in the general domain of practical, solvable problems.
The investment should be, relatively speaking, trivial, and we already have 7 billion or so working models, so I think it's fairly certain that this can be done.
Given a choice, would you advocate more resources be allocated to space travel, or AI?
I hear there's this computer called Deep Thought... programmed by a bunch of mice.
There's still one major problem with Dyson spheres.... Gravity.. or the lack of same. Given that we don't have a science that gives us gravity generators, we're kind of short on ways of making it work. Sure you can spin the thing, but all that does is throw all the free matter down to the equator and that comes with it's own set of problems. Given that as it may, what do you think of Larry Niven's Ringworld as an alternative? Take a band of funky made matter,, spin it fast enough to give you gravity, and put walls on the edges to keep the atmosphere from falling down the sides. And a ring of shadow squares to give you day and night cycles. Sure the orbit would need continual maintenance and adjustment, but at least you'd be able to see out.
I think Sheldon's hate of Babylon 5 is a way for the writer's to pimp a show that wasn't as mainstream recongized. And give it some recognition.
It's Sheldon who is established as a person with absolutely no taste for culture. If he disses a show, that generally means it's a show worth watching.
JMS didnt actually write that episode. It was Neil Gaiman (American Gods, Anansi Boys). But I wonder how much input JMS had on it as producer.
Still, my money would have been on Susan's brother, Gany, and he would have given her back the diamond earing she gave him.
Save however that being either a temporal doppelganger, psycho induced illusion, or a ghost, that would not have been an option. B5 with the exception of this story has actually always been ambivalent about the supernatural. They always tended to give a scientific explanation for what seemed tgo be supernatural events and this might not be an exception. Perhaps nothing more happened than illusions being projected into the minds of the folks who were "visited' within the designated sector of the station.