Time Scales and Elves

 It's a classic trope that sci-fi and fantasy writers have no sense of scale.

For example, space travel, specifically interstellar travel, would require an enormous amount of time without some sort of faster-than-light capabilities. The nearest star (other than the sun, of course) to us is, if I recall correctly, 4 light years away. Even getting to within a tenth of the speed of light (which would be a profoundly difficult thing to do) means it would take 40 years to get there. So you need a cheat of some sort.

In World of Warcraft, one of the really major events in Azeroth's past is the War of the Ancients. This took place 10,000 years ago. For context, human history on Earth is generally considered to be 6,000 years - dating back to the invention of writing. Certainly there were probably towns and even maybe cities before writing was invented, but basically everything prior to 6,000 years ago has to be reconstructed by archaeologists. But on Azeroth, there are individuals who were already alive at the time. Hell, many of the Draenei are over two and a half times as old - Velen looked about middle-aged when he left Argus 25,000 years ago, which would mean that the guy is probably over 50,000 years old.

I've been tooling around with the timeframe of my own homebrew D&D setting. The world has undergone many different major changes over a vast timescale. Its current era, which followed the catastrophic fall of the Parthalian civilization, has been going for about 19,000 years.

Now, there's a part of me that wants to retcon that and divide everything by ten. 1,900 years would put the era of the "Dragon Empires," which emerged after the "Reign of Madness" (the period of anarchy and cosmic horror that followed the fall of the Parthalians) at a distance that is comparable to the Roman Empire from our perspective.

Perhaps the scale is not quite right - I think the Dragon Empires ought to be more comparable to the Mesopotamian civilization, so perhaps they should have been 5000 years ago - dividing my timeline by a factor of four rather than ten.

The thing with fantasy worlds, though, is that the existence of long-lived races makes things tricky. I'm pretty confident no one on Earth could identify all their ancestors that lived 5000 years ago. But according to the Player's Handbook, elves take 100 years to be considered mature adults and can live up to 750 years. If we consider the current rough life expectancy for humans, which is 70 (remember that this is average - if you make it to age 10 you're a lot more likely to live longer,) 5000 years represents about 71 exclusive generations (by exclusive generations I mean generations that die off before the next, rather than just parent-to-child generations - the idea being that this would be a generation that won't personally know that previous one.) To an elf, though, it's only about 6 or 7. This effectively means that to an elf, 5000 years ago is the equivalent to the way we think of roughly 1560.

So, you know, certainly a long time ago but not beyond the mists of history.

You know, actually, I'm sort of talking myself into shrinking things by a factor of four. 5000 years is a lot of time for things to happen, and I actually think it's far enough back for the long-lived races that it doesn't feel like it would make the period feel insignificant to them.

And this has been my thought process!