For my personal Canon, I just say that that was Earth years, but only 400,000 stellar cycles

 

You know how time flies. You wanna conquer cybertron tomorrow and look for Megatron, once you've finished your scientific research and boom it's 4 million years later and you've got Megs on the screen asking why you haven't taken care of anything yet. Sigh.

 

Nah alot happened in these 4 million years. Shockwave reunited Cybertron like 500'000 times, but because he's so uncharismatic that the war broke out again. So Shockwave is just constantly dealing with small rebelions.

 

And to be truthful and actually fair, just about everyone who worked on Animated approves of the Allspark Almanac, so there's no reason to deny the info it provides or consider it non-canon to the show.

Big alien shapeshifting robots can live for millions of years? So what, they're big alien shapeshifting robots lol

'sides, G1 did it too and Animated's a love-letter to G1 and everything that came before, so it's not too weird for Megatron to have lived that long.

 

I don’t get what your trying to say

 

Maybe time on cybertron is different than time on earth. If cybertron is not in a star system (as confirmed in the show) it could be traveling at a speed closer to the speed of light that earth, making time on cybertron go by slower than on earth? That's just an idea. There are still plenty of things that could invalidate that idea...

If I were to make a continuity 1000 years would probably be a good lifespan (about the same as living to 100 as a human) of course some well maintained (or maybe digitally uploaded?) bots could definitly exceed that age.

As for the war, even 400 years seems huge. However, being a war for the whole universe and all that (and they do have longer lifespans than us). Maybe multiple smaller (relativly speaking) wars would work better though.

 

I don’t feel like there should even be a gap. I prefer that they go from Cybertron to Earth without going into stasis

 

I think the Transformers being millions of years old, or any fictional species being millions of years old, is always a little weird. Whenever we see them, they have their arcs and character development, but you’re saying that they only changed in the year (at best) the show/movie/whatever that the show took place in? It’s just weird. I know they’re supposed to seem alien to us in a way, but at the same time, there are other ways they can seem alien to us besides their age. Like how in Prime, the cortical psychic patch was something only the robots could do, and it was like plugging in an HDMI cord from a laptop or something. Or how in Steven Universe, it took time for Rose to actually see Greg as a person she could have a relationship and eventual marriage(?) with.

 

If it's handled the way IDW did it, I don't necessarily mind 4 million years of war. They implied and/or outright said that they weren't at total war for that full duration and that there were downtimes and stalemates.

I mean, look at the US and how divided they are. You're taking that schism and applying it to nigh-undefeatable beings going at each other with so many sunken costs from both sides that neither are willing to back down (or in the Autobots case, can't).

Otherwise, yeah, 4 mil is way too long. IDW was the only time it felt right to me.

 

I’m not sure how that makes s difference in this case

the 4 million years was something confirmed by written words on screen in the first episode

like when you see a city name on screen

Are you talking G1?
If so, when was that confirmed to be the case before they used the space bridge to bring the planet to earth?
True they never showed us a star but that doesn’t confirm anything

 

I'm meaning this as a semi cannon explanation. It's just a theory I have. If cybertron is moving thru space faster than earth, the 4 million years would still be the same on earth; but the war on cybertron would be considerably less that 4 million years by the time that the space bridge allows them to make contact.

Then the scheme to bring cybertron to earth ends up returning cybertron to a slower movement thru space which allows the perception of time to be the same as on earth.

 

A weird thing about G1 is when the female Autobots bump into Optimus etc after they’ve been away for millions of years they barely even react

 

are you talking the G1 cartoon?
Because there was no indication that Cybertron was traveling through space in the cartoon

And again, the 4 million year thing was how long the Ark was stuck in the volcano , first episode we see the ship crash, Then a time lapse of the same volcano and then the words “4 million years later”

What?
Do you remember the episode?
Optimus reacted greatly to learn Elita was alive, and the other females were surprised to see Ironhide and the others as well

 

Yeah I'm talking abot g1 cartoon/comic. Someone says that cybertron is drifting thru space without a star in the cartoon. There is nothing to say it is moving fast at all. I'm just saying "what if it was" and explaing how that could possibly solve the issue.

 

It was only moving through space in the comic, anytime it was moving through space in the cartoon was after they woke up and it was generally to move it to Earth.

 

I must have forgotten in that case

 

I think you are mixing things up
Thar was said in the comic book, not the cartoon

Not a bad idea thou

 

i agree, my headcanon is typically the war has been raging for a few thousand years but i have no real input on transformers age. maybe a a typical cybertronian life span being about 1 million years, at most.

 

Not to mention the time it would take for the Ark to arrive on Earth. If we're talking about the original location of Alpha Centauri (presumably Proxima B, which is an Earth-like planet in the habitable zone of the trinary star system and would be presumably comfortable for mechanical and organic lifeforms), that's over 4 light years away. Either the Ark was moving super slow to survive the impact on Earth or they were moving at light speed and were able to throttle down before crashing. If it is the former, you'd have to be flying in under 20,000mph, which is being overly generous as that's the speed it takes to gain orbit. That would be over 134,000 years just to get to Earth.

If it's the latter, traveling four times the speed of light to get to Earth in one year would be traveling 2,682,466,516mph. An impact like that would likely obliterate the volcano, as well as a good chunk of the Earth's crust in North America - firing rock out of orbit and creating a ring around the Earth that would still be there 4 million years later. There would be no more Ark and Cybertronians...they'd be mantle juice. Most life would've gone extinct from a fire storm and then a nuclear winter. Humanity wouldn't exist.

 

The only place I've seen that gave a location for both Cybertron and Earth was the galactic map from the Allspark Almanac, and it placed the two essentially on the opposite sides of the galaxy. I looked up the size of the Milky Way, and I found out that if the Ark were to be travelling nonstop at the speed of light, it would still take around 100,000 years to get from Cybertron to Earth.