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How does one calculate the age of a Time Lord?

Is it the time since he was born until the canon present? Or is it the sum of the days he lives?

Because if it is the latter, he could live billion of years in five seconds.

So, do they really have an age? Does The Doctor really have an age? Or does he say he is 900 or 2000 years old just to prove a point?

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    Hello Elena, Welcome to SFF. You might want to split this post into two distinct posts as it contains two different questions. Otherwise it might get closed as too broad.
    – Aegon
    Aug 31, 2016 at 13:01
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    How does one calculate the age of a Time Lord? Very well, thank y— huh. Guess that joke doesn’t always work.
    – Paul D. Waite
    Aug 31, 2016 at 14:09
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    obligatory: 'one does not simply'....
    – NKCampbell
    Aug 31, 2016 at 14:17
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    It's...timey-wimey...
    – tilley31
    Aug 31, 2016 at 14:22
  • scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/135898/…
    – Valorum
    Aug 31, 2016 at 14:46

1 Answer 1

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A Time Lord cannot "live billions of years in 5 seconds." A Time Lord might move between two points in time billions of years apart, but they don't "get older" doing so. Time Lords age the same way everyone else does: how many seconds/minutes/etc their body has spent being alive. Since they do not travel linearly through time, you can't compute their age by simple subtraction, but they still age just the same as we do. For example, if The Doctor starts out in the year 2000, gets in his TARDIS, travels for 5 minutes, and exits in the year 10000, he's not 8000 years older -- he's 5 minutes older.

When a Time Lord gives an age, they're just telling you what their internal biological clock is saying about their age. When The Doctor says he's 1200 years old, he means "I have lived through 1200 years worth of time since I was born".

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    I didn't answer your second question about regeneration because it probably should be a separate one.
    – KutuluMike
    Aug 31, 2016 at 13:14
  • I believe that by "live billions of years in 5 seconds" Elena is referring to our point of view. For example, if a timelord goes back in time a few million years, lives a million years, and goes back to 5 minutes after his starting point".
    – Gorchestopher H
    Aug 31, 2016 at 14:06
  • @GorchestopherH That's what I thought but the OP specifically refer to "the sum of the day he lives" with that comment, which to me means "the number of days he experiences", which is much different than "the difference between the dates he experiences"
    – KutuluMike
    Aug 31, 2016 at 14:08
  • Thank you for your answers. Kind of helped me.
    – Elena
    Aug 31, 2016 at 19:58

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