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When nine hundred years old you reach, look as good you will not, hmm?

I'm sure this was mostly a facetious joke. But was Yoda as old as he was because of his race, or because of his bind to the force?

Would Jedi or Sith live longer than the normal life span for their race, compared to those who had less tie or no training in the force?

Judging from Anakin and Obi-Wan's appearance changes between I-III and IV-VI, humans appeared to age at a somewhat normal pace. But would their life spans increase?

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  • I'm going to guess no, at least not if they continue to age at a normal pace. Could you imagine what a 900 year old human would look like at that rate? Also, the life span for a Sith is probably shorter than average. Even with the rule of two there should be frequent tests between the apprentice and master (although the original trilogy seemed to downplay this).
    – Xantec
    Commented Dec 7, 2011 at 14:47
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    The Old Republic era seems to have a Sith Emperor that uses secrete dark side rituals to extend his life into a thousand of years even though most Sith (the race of Sith, not necessarily the religion of the Sith) have about the same life span as humans. (IIRC, I don't have references for this right now. But most of it comes from the newly released Revan novel.)
    – Mufasa
    Commented Dec 7, 2011 at 15:38
  • Weren't some of the practitioners of the Sith way of that era also Sith-Human hybrids? Could that account for the increased lifespan?
    – HorusKol
    Commented Dec 7, 2011 at 21:46
  • I've sometimes wondered (not very seriously) if Yoda is just what a 900-year-old human looks like.
    – Keith Thompson
    Commented Dec 10, 2011 at 0:24

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I was going to say no, that my impression was that Yoda's age was a characteristic of his species, but the Star Wars Wiki article on Yoda's species has this answer:

Members of the species were very small, most standing below 70 centimeters, but had extremely long lifespans lasting many hundreds of years (though because all known members of the species were Jedi, who are known to generally have longer lifespans than what is ordinary for a species, the exact average lifespan of the species is unknown).

Unfortunately, this wiki section doesn't list a canonical source, so I don't know how accurate it is. I haven't been able to find canonical data either way.

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  • 3
    having said that - Ben Kenobi seemed to have aged more rapidly than you'd expect over the 18-20 years between RotS and ANH - although, I suppose he would be in his 60s by then and the desert is a harsh environment
    – HorusKol
    Commented Dec 7, 2011 at 21:48
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    +1. Is there any info on non-Jedi or dark-Jedi force-wielders?
    – Merlyn Morgan-Graham
    Commented Dec 7, 2011 at 21:54
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    The quote in the above answer has no source attributed to it, and I cannot find any other examples of long-lived human Jedi or long-lived human Sith, mostly because the most prominent ones meet violent ends. Even Luke Skywalker's time of death is not established. I've updated my answer to reflect this.
    – NorbyTheGeek
    Commented Dec 9, 2011 at 21:46
  • @HorusKol that was answered in this question (he was actually 57): scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/12269/…
    – The Fallen
    Commented Jun 22, 2012 at 18:14

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