Anna Daniels
The creature from The Mandalorian that Star Wars fans lovingly call “Baby Yoda” is not Yoda as a child. We are not even sure how, if at all, it is related to Yoda. However, it is within the same species as the OG Yoda. The little green creature that Mando (Pedro Pascal) calls “the Kid” or sometimes “the Child” is all over social media. Let’s take a look at how old our favorite little Meme from Disney+ is and why that number does not add up.
‘The Mandalorian’: How old is Baby Yoda?
When the fan-favorite new Star Wars series dropped on Disney+, fans rejoiced over the massive shock at the end of the first episode. The person Mando was searching for was actually an adorable little green creature with huge ears, who resembled Yoda.
“Wait, they said 50 years old,” said a shocked Mando in chapter 1 of The Mandalorian. When he looks at how small the Child is, he can’t believe the creature is already 50.
“Species age differently,” answered the droid that helped Mando get in to retrieve the asset.
The droid is correct, seeing as we know that Yoda Proper (the original one from The Empire Strikes Back) lived to be over 900 years old—he died of old age in Return of the Jedi. This species does not age like humans do.
How old does Baby Yoda act in ‘The Mandalorian’ compared to a human?
From the way the Child acts in The Mandalorian, we can surmise that he is the equivalent to a toddler in the human species—likely around 18 months old.
If we are taking notes on this creature, we know that Baby Yoda can now walk. His ears move up and down to show emotion. They are down very far when he sees Mando get hurt. They go back up again when he sees that Mando is okay.
He ate a considerably sized frog—whole. He makes little noises but is not speaking yet. As of right now, he acts like a human toddler who can walk, show emotions, and tend to eat their food without chewing it.
In Chapter 4 of The Mandalorian, he keeps playing with the controls in Mando’s spaceship. He doesn’t listen when Mando tells him to stop—also very similar to a human toddler. Next, Mando tells him to stay on the ship, and the Child follows him anyway—the parents watching can all relate.
Aside from levitating a Mudhorn monster to help Mando defeat it—everything else seems about right for an 18-month-old to two-year-old human, at most.
Here is the Baby Yoda math that does not add up in ‘The Mandalorian’
Let’s use the benchmark of 900 years-old as the life expectancy for the Yoda species to compare it to that of humans. The average life expectancy for a human male in 1980—when Yoda was introduced—was 70 years old.
With some simple math—900 divided by 70—we can surmise that the Yoda species ages almost 13 years for each one human year. This conclusion is similar to saying one human year is seven dog years, developmentally.
Therefore, if Baby Yoda is 50 years old, that means he is roughly four-years-old in human development (13 x 4= 52). However, he does not act developmentally four years old yet. Something does not work out here.
Let’s try to flip the problem around. If we assume that Baby Yoda is two-years-old, that would give us 25 human years for each 1 year of the species. Let’s take Yoda Proper’s age of 900 and divide by that 25—that would make him 36 when he died. The math is not adding up here.
We could believe that “species age differently,” but would we be true Star Wars fans if we didn’t read into this a little bit? For now, we can just enjoy the fact that Baby Yoda is quite far from dying of old age. You can catch more chapters of the tiny green creature in The Mandalorian, streaming now on Disney+.
Written by: Cheat
