COULD AGE LINES EVER BECOME A REAL TECHNOLOGY?

The age line was an enchantment that prevented anyone with the incorrect age from accessing certain objects or areas. It was used in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire to prevent underage voting. Of course, in muggle society, children are also limited in this way as they can’t vote until the age of eighteen in most countries.

There are many situations in society where there is reason to limit someone’s freedom based on their age, such as driving, drinking, working, and even playing. Each situation has different reasons for the age limit, whether for safety reasons, to provide fair competition, or to ensure that a person has gathered a reasonable level of accountability and life experience. The age line basically allows a person’s real age to be used to discriminate against them, which sounds a bit alarming when put that way. Will we ever develop a technology like this or is it here already?

Age Restrictions

When Dumbledore drew the age line, it was to help enforce age restrictions imposed by the Ministry of Magic. The ministry had determined that the extremely dangerous Triwizard tournament should not be entered by anyone under the age of seventeen due to the mortal risks involved. As such, the age line was used to prevent anyone under that age from getting close enough to enter their name into the goblet of fire. In the wizarding world, seventeen is a significant age because wizards are not allowed to use magic outside of school until that age.

In muggle society, age restrictions are an everyday thing. In the UK, you can’t work full-time until you’re sixteen, and to get a credit card, drive, or vote (except in Scotland), you need to be at least eighteen years of age. Eighteen is significant in many countries because it represents what’s known as the age of majority. This is when a person is considered accountable for their own actions and their parents no longer have legal control over their affairs.

Societies introduce age restrictions for good reason, although younger citizens may not agree. For example, the age appropriateness of a movie is denoted by a rating system (PG, PG13, R, etc.) This is to protect younger viewers from any adverse psychological responses to the movie. It’s actually not an offence for a younger person to watch an age-restricted movie outside of a licensed cinema, however there is a responsibility for adults to ensure that younger viewers don’t suffer any ill-effects due to viewing a film. As such, if staff at a cinema are in doubt about a person’s age, they are legally required to ask for proof of age in the form of an official I.D. that includes a photo and date of birth such as a passport or driver’s license.

The same applies at premises with a license to sell alcohol; if a person can’t prove they are old enough, then they are refused service by the staff. Many drinking establishments also employ bouncers or security staff at the door who provide a physical barrier to entry. In essence, they have a similar function to an age line and are the first line of defense against age deception.

Age and Deception

“An Age Line! …Well, that should be fooled by an Ageing Potion, shouldn’t it? And once your name’s in that Goblet, you’re laughing—it can’t tell whether you’re seventeen or not!” —Fred Weasley, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Youngsters find ingenious ways to try and deceive the powers that be, but their degree of deception need only be as complicated as the security measures put in place to apprehend them. When it comes to face-to-face deception, beyond just barefaced fibbing, a youngster might resort to behaving or dressing in a way that makes them appear older. If this doesn’t work, they might borrow an older person’s I.D. card or even obtain a counterfeit I.D. However, relatively recently the increasing use of online consumerism and social media has necessitated new requirements for age verification—often accompanied by different methods to circumvent them. For example, many social media websites, such as Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram have a minimum age restriction of thirteen. YouTube’s age limit is also thirteen, but only if the youngster has their parents’ permission; otherwise, it’s actually eighteen. Despite these age restrictions, more than half of British youngsters under the age of thirteen still have a profile on at least one social networking site.

A reason this is possible is that age verification on many of the websites make use of what’s called an age affirmation page, where the user simply enters a date of birth or clicks a checkbox to declare that they are over 18. So, a youngster can just invent a suitable age when setting up an account and the website moderators will be none the wiser. It’s almost like the Weasley brothers walking up to the age line and simply saying they are above seventeen to gain access.

However, when the Weasley brothers and friends took the ageing potion to try and fool the age line by increasing their biological age, the subterfuge didn’t work. It seems the age line didn’t need to make use of their apparent biological age. Instead, it was able to discern their chronological age i.e. the days and years that have passed since the date of their birth.

In most muggle societies, age verification is typically done by humans, but the introduction of increasingly sophisticated technologies has been steadily moving this responsibility over to computer systems and software. When it comes to online businesses, there are various age verification methods available. This includes the classic checking of identity documents in person, as well as credit card verification and online identity check software.

One online source describes its identity verification solutions as “calling upon an extensive wealth of consumer data, including one of the largest dates of birth files in the UK.” So, anytime a user provides an indication of who they are, such as through a password login or fingerprint, their identity can be cross referenced against a stored database somewhere that contains information about their age. As long as that information is reliable, then their chronological age can be correctly verified. But what if there’s no available record of a person’s chronological age? Is there anything within our biology that could allow our age to be determined?

Age Discrimination

As we age, different cells in our body deteriorate, reducing their ability to function normally. Some organs also experience a decrease in the number of cells due to the cells dying off and not being replaced. These are some of the causes of biological ageing, also known as senescence from the Latin word senescere meaning “to grow old.” Common physiological changes include less elastic skin, weaker eyesight, and a reduction in the range of frequencies we can hear.

There are already technologies that have made use of some of these biological changes to enforce restrictions based on age. One example is the Mosquito anti-loitering device that is described by one online retailer as “The most effective tool for dispersing groups of misbehaving teenagers.” The device works by exploiting the fact that as we age, our ears become less sensitive to higher frequency sounds. This is known as presbycusis. As such, the designers of the Mosquito set the unit to emit an irritating tone at a frequency of 17 Kilohertz, which they say is inaudible to the majority of people over the age of 25.

Although the high frequency tone is harmless, it can be so annoying that those who can hear it generally prefer to avoid the area surrounding the device. Its effects can be felt up to 40 meters away, but it doesn’t penetrate solid walls.

In this way the Mosquito acts as a rudimentary form of age line, if only in the sense that it can effectively repel people under a certain age. However, not everyone over the age of 25 is immune to its effects, and it doesn’t actually present a physical barrier to entry like a doorman would. It’s not certain whether the age line is meant to present a physical barrier, or function in some other way. The Mosquito alarm is an example of a way to restrict someone based on their biological age, but there are technologies that can determine someone’s chronological age through their biology.

Biological Age Markers

The scientific study of biological ageing is called biogerontology, and researchers in this field have developed a variety of techniques to ascertain someone’s age. One such method involves measuring the length of telomeres, which are regions on the end of chromosomes that, amongst other things, affect how quickly cells age and die. At our birth, they can be more than 10,000 base pairs long, but they lose a bit every time the cell divides, so that by old age, they can be just 4,000 base pairs long.

Assessment of telomere length can already be done in a lab, although it requires very particular circumstances and equipment such as microscopes and the collection of cell samples from the person under investigation. However, if an age line could somehow tap into a person’s cells, it could potentially use an analysis of the telomere lengths to gain an idea of the person’s biological age.

Another method that can be used to pinpoint the biologically older parts of the human body is called DNA methylation (DNAm). DNAm is a mechanism used by cells to control gene expression. The older a person is, the less the DNAm mechanism functions. This allows it to be used as a biomarker of ageing, i.e., it can be used to predict a person’s biological age. This method is responsible for the so-called DNA methylation clock also called the epigenetic clock, which is believed to provide a relatively good prediction of biological age.

Using this method, a team of Dutch researchers have managed to predict a person’s real age to within four years using blood samples and to within 5 years using teeth samples. However, the younger the person, the better the error rate, leading to an accuracy of about two years in younger people.

So, Could Age Lines Ever Become a Reality?

Well, for a start, the general need to protect the safety of youngsters in our societies is a strong pull toward age-restricting technology. And considering the vast number of other situations in which it is necessary to limit access to some services, it would seem that any technology that could replicate something approximating an age line would be of great value to some commercial companies. After all, commercial value is a powerful motivation to fund technology. There do exist ways to determine age, but they mostly require samples to be taken and then time to analyze them. Whether this could somehow be done at a distance of three meters, the radius of the age line, is currently unlikely. Maybe one day a few of these methods could be combined with a technique to ascertain personal information about somebody from a distance, but as yet it doesn’t look promising. We’ll have to just wait and see.