Fact vs fiction: Aging in sci-fi and fantasy
By WiC Staff
Chapter 4. The Child in THE MANDALORIAN, exclusively on Disney+
Baby Yoda — (The Mandalorian) — 50 years old
Even if you haven’t seen The Mandalorian, or somehow haven’t seen Star Wars, the chances are you’ll have seen the adorable Baby Yoda (or The Child, to use his given name) gracing your social media.
But did you realize Baby Yoda is actually 50 years old? You might be wondering how this is possible.
Clearly, humans stop being babies at a much younger age. Many view this as happening when we learn to walk, which can typically happen between eight months and up to 2 years.
In fact, walking is indicative of our ability to learn. It’s one of the first real, tangible developmental milestones. It happens so early in our life that most of us probably don’t even remember it. Typically, we will all experience this milestone at similar ages.
However, there are several species on Earth which live much longer than humans; one such example is the Greenland shark, the oldest recorded vertebrae at 400 years old. These majestic creatures reach adulthood, defined as sexual maturity, at a staggering 150 years old.
If you were to take this age of 150 and divide it by 18 (typically the age at which humans reach full adulthood), you would get 8.3. This could imply that at around 8.3 years old, the Greenland shark could still be considered an infant by our standards. While this does not come anywhere close to Baby Yoda, it demonstrates, at least, that different paces at which different species age.
It would not be unrealistic to hypothesize that the extent of this could be far greater among the stars, where there must surely be extraterrestrial life far unlike that which we know.