Received from Ben Eisler via Facebook:

Hi everyone,

As some of you may be aware, Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal and President of Clarium Capital) is presently committed to matching all donations to the SENS Foundation for aging research by a further fifty percent.

In other words, this means that by reaching our target of ten thousand members, our group has the potential to raise an additional 500 thousand dollars for medical research to end the disabilities and diseases of aging, for everyone.

However, there’s a catch. To take advantage of this considerable matching grant, we must reach our target by the end of this year, giving us just over a month to get there.

We believe we can do it.

We are proposing a massive push so as to make this happen, and we need your help.

If everyone can attract just a few friends to sign up for our cause page, we can reach our target of ten thousand members and raise as much as 1.5 million dollars for SENS research. Ideally we would like to get there by Christmas, as that will give us a week to collect on donations.

This may seem like a tall ask, but remember, there is power in numbers. Once we reach two thousand members, everyone will need attract only four other people to reach our target. Once we reach five thousand, everyone will need to attract only ONE other person, and so on. All very doable!

In the meantime, both SENS Foundation (sens.org) and the Immortality Institute (imminst.org) will be promoting our cause on their websites, which will be a great help as well.

Let’s get to work, and bring an end to the disabilities and diseases of aging.

If 10,000 people all agree to give $100, and Peter Thiel matches it 50%, that equals $1.5M.

Some of us, like those in my generation (I’m 25), may be reluctant to give to SENS because they believe that medical science will progress fast enough without their intervention to let them live indefinitely. I would consider that unfair and calloused to our friends from earlier generations.

Of course, another route to life extension would be through friendly artificial general intelligence (FAI). It’s worth remembering that if we solve the aging problem but not the FAI problem, we all die anyway. However, if we solve the FAI problem but not the aging problem, it’s quite likely that FAI will then solve the aging problem for us. So FAI is truly the only long-term solution for life extension, but SENS is a possible shorter-term solution for the older among us. Even modest success for SENS might also cause the wealthier, older set to start thinking about the longer-term future, which includes the question of how to program powerful artificial intelligences that don’t automatically kill us through indifference.