Picard's age:

Various novels obviously mention various assignments, too, although Memory Beta only name-drops the Antares from Simon Hawke's Blaze of Glory, and Diane Duane's Intellivore indicates the Pathfinder as another early ship. The novel continuity is biased by JM Friedman's storyline where Picard spends almost his entire career aboard the Stargazer, though.

As far as starship commanders in TNG go, a character acted by Patrick Stewart isn't out of place in terms of age. We saw few young COs, although admittedly we generally failed to see the COs of small ships, a couple of Mirandas notwithstanding. But we could assume that 24th century medicine puts aging on hold at middle age, not at youth (or else we would have much more of young characters overall); somebody looking like Stewart in his fifties and sixties might plausibly be anything from 40 to 80 and perhaps beyond.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Seasoned? That's a horrible thing to say to a man...

 

^ Or a steak.

 

There's a lot at steak here...

 

Ah so there's his age. Figured he was an old experienced captain, in his fifties by the time we saw TNG's first ep.

 

He's Explicitly said to have been in his 20s when commanding Stargazer, and that was 30+ years before "TNG: Encounter At Farpoint".

We never learnt much about the intervening years or whether he actually commanded any ships on extended missions in-between those assignments, but I always figured there might have been some degree of shore based duty following the loss of Stargazer but before they gave him the keys to a new ship again.

 

Thirty plus years is a very long time! It's long enough to be the captain of five or six consecutive ships... It's hard to believe that after such a long time doing nothing, they gave him the command of the most advanced ship in star fleet. That wouldn't make much sense.

 

^ The Buried Age does explain that, IIRC.

 

Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids.

 

By then they had a breathable atmosphere on Mars. It was almost the case already during Archer's time.

 

My little joke, extremely little, is dead.

 

Umm, no. Nothing of the sort is ever said in Star Trek. Indeed, every detail about Picard's service aboard the Stargazer comes from the 2350s, just before the loss of the ship, or is lacking a timestamp altogether.

That's the confusing thing in these discussions: the story about Picard taking control of the bridge of the ship after the CO was incapacitated is confirmed but not timestamped ("Tapestry"), and the idea that he immediately became CO himself is not part of the Trek canon at all, yet the two concepts often become confused and quoted for fact.

Timo Saloniemi

 

*Groan* Way to miss the joke, Mr LB...

 

The USS. Reliant was originally going to be a Constitution.

 

The 30-plus years thing is one of those writers' accidents: the TNG writers' guide said that he'd commanded the Stargazer with immense success for 22 years, implying it was immediately prior to TNG, and the reason why he'd been given the Enterprise.
Then 10-ish episodes in, The Battle established that Stargazer was lost nine years before TNG, but the 22-year line in the guide remained in and was assumed [even if the writers had wanted to change it, the writers' guide was out there in fandom], even if it was maybe never explicitly mentioned onscreen (think it was, but without checking I may be transferring my fanon assumptions...).
Hence the later hints that maybe Picard took over as Stargazer CO in some emergency that killed his superiors, and all that, which would have made him Stargazer's acting CO very very young, but not necessarily a captain in rank until Starfleet confirmed it and promoted him.

I could see his Stargazer career going something like
Lt-Cdr Picard, Second Officer (newly promoted and transferred)
Lt-Cdr Picard, acting Captain (following deaths of captain and first officer).
Commander Picard, confirmed as Captain by Starfleet in view of recent service and promoted accordingly (given that a small ship like Stargazer could be COed by a commander).
Captain Picard, CO Stargazer, promoted after several years of exemplary service in that role.
And then, eventually, Captain Picard, mandatory court martial for loss of USS Stargazer pending...

 

Actually, studies show that with a proper atmosphere ( with a greenhouse effect inducing layer above), the equatorial region should be mild and therefore quite livable. That's assuming that we could terraform Mars, which in the Star trek universe we did.

 

Just add gravity plating at all will be fine.

 

Geordi, Leah and family are said to live on Rigel III.