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Some age limits exist for valid reasons, Räsänen writes in the Journal of Medical Ethics. A 90-year-old pilot arguably might pose a safety hazard. However, “not all old people pose safety risks and not all jobs are of the sort where people’s lives might be in danger.”

Räsänen says every age change candidate would need to be tested and evaluated, though he can’t offer definite answers as to exactly, how. “These are questions that I think biologists and medical doctors should consider together with philosophers and bioethicists.”

Still, his support for legal age change dovetails nicely with the narrative coming out of Silicon Valley, where immortalists are sinking millions into human life extension, from young-blood transfusions and “rejuvenation” tune-ups that would return us to the biological fitness (inside and out) of a 20- or 30-year old, to cryonics — the freezing of human corpses in the hope of being able to defrost and resurrect them in the future. As a thought experiment, Räsänen asks, “What if sometime in the future the technology makes it possible to freeze living people so that their aging process is reduced significantly?”

Suppose that a 30-year-old woman is frozen for 100 years with technology that reduces her aging to 10 per cent of normal. “When she wakes up after 100 years, her body has only aged by 10 years. Should she be treated under the law as a 40-year-old, or a 130-year-old?”

Frozen corpses aside, Räsänen believes that, should legal age change be permitted, it shouldn’t be fluid — people shouldn’t necessarily be allowed to go older. Some might want to “age” in order to drink or drive sooner, collect retirement benefits earlier or get a decade or two of people telling them how fabulous they look for their age. None of those reasons would satisfy his “criterion.”