What should we go by to determine her actual age. Her body's age or her time "alive." Please hear me out. Looking through Memory Alpha we see: Using the dates used by MA She has been alive for 24 years. 2374-2350=24. However, her body was aged from a 6 year old to an adult in 5 years. For arguments sake, let's agree she emerged from the chamber with the body of an 18 year old. Then she was a Borg Drone for 13 years, making her body 31 years old. So in determining her age, do we simply use her years alive; or do we use her body's age? I say she's 31 during the events of Scorpion. Because the Maturation Chamber aged her body quickly to make her a drone. What say you?
The Borg speed up the aging of children so that they can be useful drones. The same process, or a completely different is probably used to retard their ageing. It's possible that she has looked 27 since she was 12, and would have continued to look 27 for the next 5 centuries if she hadn't made a break for it.
I date by her birth year. In TOS: The Deadly Years, when Kirk was afflicted with the rapid aging disease, he had the physical infirmities of a 70 year old man, but he was still only 34 years old. In TNG: Unnatural Selection, there is a 12 year old boy who looks like he's 20, but he's still 12.
Growing up I never saw the pilot to Thundercats, so I always thought that it was odd that Liono wasn't making kittens with all the good looking pussycat girls he ran away to Earth with... But it turned out that in the pilot Liono was an 8 year old cub, who had been in a dodgy stasis tube that took 10 formative years frorm him. Mind of an 8 year old in the body of a 18 year old, so no wonder that series was the mother of all cluster####s.
I think keeping track of character's ages in space, subject to relativity, should be virtually impossible. Time should not be passing at the same rate on the USS Voyager as it does on Earth. It's one of those things Trek likes to ignore, but I find it pretty useful when it comes to reconciling contradictory ages (like Chekov and AU Chekov)
Relativity doesn't count in these circumstances. Full impulse is .25 C You don't start hitting noticeable/usable time dilation issues till you're past .95 C, which you avoid completely if you are using subspace science and warp fields to trick the universe into ignoring it's own rules.
Well, for a start, if Annika was six when she was assimilated, then this is a three year old: And the stardate of 25479 is actually 2348. Season 1 of TNG is in the 41000 range and set in 2364. Going with the oft-accepted 1000 starunits make a year, then 25479 is 16 years earlier, which makes it 2348, not 2350. Going with a 2348 birth year means the girl in the above picture is five, not three, which is much more believable. After all, Annika wasn't acting like a three year old, she seemed much more mature to me. And she certainly didn't look like a three year old either. And yes, this would make her eight when she was assimilated, but the line, "My cake had six candles, and one more to grow on... and then the men came" can't be taken to imply that she was assimilated shortly after her 6th birthday. She's remembering literally from another life, and who has clear memories from that age anyway? It's entirely plausible that she was assimilated shortly after turning 8, and just remembered the birthday with the six candles and one more, and associated the 8th birthday with the 6th.
I've learned through life experience that it is probably just better to avoid the topic of age altogether when it comes to the fairer sex.
I have the feeling though, that even after being on Earth and dealing with a far greater number of humans than she had post-liberation but pre-Endgame, Annika still would not likely blanch at giving a straightforward answer to the question if proffered.
What if she starts counting the years she spent awake in Unimatrix Zero? Add it all up and that's probably another ten or 20 years, if computerized AR is even a little faster than regular reality... Does Miles O'Brien add those 20 years he spent in AR prison to his birthday cake?
Does it mean Picard should include that whole other life he lived in "The Inner Light"? Should he add another 20 or 30 years of life experience because he was in a dream for 20 minutes?
Yup. Just like he should still be celebrating the birthdays of his wife, children and grand children.
That simply adds two years to then number of years she existed. 26 instead of 24. But that doesn't take into account her body's forced growth in the Maturation Chamber. She would still be, again only for the sake of argument, 18 when she emerged from the chamber and then spent the next 13 years as a Drone until the events of Scorpion. In Unimatrix Zero, all the drones appeared to be the ages they were already. The children would be drones in a MC. The adults would be whatever physical age they were as Drones. I think no to both. Picard and O'Brien never had their actual bodies aged. Memories were implanted. One a lifetime of memories and a skill added, the other had years added. In the end their bodies never aged. They just have memories of things that never happened to them. That is a strong possibility, as we've never seen an Octogenarian Human drone. But it could also be that once a drone reaches a point where it's body is of no use to the Collective the drone is disconnected from the Collective and dies.
Did Magnus and his missus Drones look 60 to 70 years old when we saw then in modern day near the end of Dark Frontier?
I couldn't really tell if Seven's father looked 70 or so years. My point though, is once it becomes to costly to repair the biological components, the drones usefulness is over.
who says it was her eighth birthday cake? Like I said, perhaps she remembered that she was assimialted shortly after a birthday, and she has a pretty clear memory of her sixth birthday, and just connected the two in her mind. Strictly speaking, the only thing we can conclude from the dialogue is that she had her sixth birthday and was assimilated some point afterwards. No indication of how much time had passed. Agreed. it makes very little difference to her age in Voyager. It only affects her age when we saw her in Dark Frontier. He didn't look any older, but I would suspect that assimilation can slow the deterioration of the body's natural aging process. And we never saw Erin as a drone.
That was my point. Earlier the guess was that if Seven stayed Borg, that she would not continue at age at a normal human rate. "We" were looking for evidence to prove that hypothesis.
In Drone, don't they say that maturation chambers accelerate the development of the infant? Seems to me that the development is accelerated by some factor, maybe twice or three times, depending on the physiology of the individual drone, and once the drone comes out, the aging process is curtailed by nanoprobes.
The root of maturation is "mature". Not exactly hiding what they are doing, are they? Although Janeway said that Icheb's parents had a little trouble recognizing him.