Mini-spoilers for Caprica and MAJOR spoilers for Battlestar Galactica.
How old did you all think Bill Adama was on Battlestar? My wife and I assumed he was around 55-60, considering how he looks and the fact that Lee appears to be about 30-35.
However, Caprica indicates that Bill is 11 years old and the show takes place 58 years before BSG’s pilot(when the Cylons attack).
This, and Battlestar Wiki agrees with me, makes him 73 years old when he settles down on the new Earth and buries Laura Roslin.
Did you picture Bill Adama as being 69-73 years old during the run of BSG? Should Caprica have just taken place 45 years before BSG?
Yeah, I can see him being that old. 55 seems far too young. But I tend to hang out with people who make being 75 look easy, so maybe my experience doesn’t reflect most people’s.
Given that the first Cylon war is supposed to have taken place 40 years before the start of the series and Adama was a pilot in it, that automatically makes him 20+ years old at that time and 60+ around the time of the miniseries. Unless Moore wanted to make Bill Adama a main character of Caprica, they would’ve had to set the series back further when he was younger so he could be a secondary or tertiary character. So if anything, it seems that the powers that be were more locked in by the timeline they set up in the miniseries.
He was also due to retire in the miniseries (presumably as soon as Galactica got back to port). The upper ranks of the Soviet military remained dominated by veterans of the Great Patriotic War until the USSR fell. Maybe the Colonial Admiralty operated the same we (Cain’s career was on the fast track, Adama & Tigh commented on her age).
Billl also spend a lot of time on space ships traveling at high speeds. While their FTL travel appears to be instantaneous, I think it’s safe to say that in normal subluminal cruising speeds, they may be traveling fast enough to experience some minor relativistic time dilation effects over the course of his career. So maybe from Adama’s reference, he only aged 55 years while from Caprica’s reference it’s been 60 years.
Well, both Adama and Tigh are poster boys for the Tough Old Bastard Society. Maybe it’s the benefits of drinking enough hard liquor to drown a racehorse.
Of course, if the years given are Caprican years, maybe they’re a little shorter than Earth years.
I’m only vaguely familiar with BSG, but a quick google search tells me that they have faster than light travel. Maybe if he spent a lot of time zipping around at FTL speeds, he’d age slower.