(Crossposted from Fight Aging!)

As noted over at the Methuselah Foundation blog, the Foundation technology volunteers have enabled group memberships in The Three Hundred:

For the price of a cup of coffee per day, would you like to join a select group of humanitarians who will be remembered for their vision and saving millions of lives? Modern medical science continues to show us that the aging process may no longer be the intractable problem it has been perceived to be for every generation preceding ours. There is a present need to move faster towards a previously unattainable goal: the control of aging. This need for more rapid medical progess is only magnified by the current profound lack of funding for aging research. Funding springs, at root, from widespread public awareness of advances and possibilities in aging research. Educating the public is an essential step in moving philanthropists and governments to allocate more resources to the study of aging. The problems caused by aging leave us poor in body, spirit, and finances. We must step forward to tackle them!

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What's it worth to you to live 150 healthy years? What's it worth to you to raise the average human lifespan to 150 years, just as a start? These are not idle questions! Membership of The Three Hundred is a meaningful but affordable commitment: $1,000 a year, by the end of each year, for 25 years. This amounts to $85 a month or $2.75 a day, the equivalent of a visit to Starbucks.

I and many others in the healthy life extension community have joined The Three Hundred in the fast few years order to meaningfully influence the future of longevity research - these funds go to the Mprize for anti-aging research, and the SENS research funded by the Methuselah Foundation. But if you don't want to take on a place in The Three Hundred by yourself, why not band together with your friends and share in the knowledge that you are helping to advance the healthy life extension cause?

For an examination of why everyone should step up and contribute to the growth of the Methuselah Foundation and success of its initiatives, I turn to an essay by Michael Rae:

While I am still relatively young and believe that I am indeed aging more slower than those around me, I have suffered the loss of my loved ones to the aging process already. It's bad enough to watch allegedly "independently-living" aged strangers out in public, idly shuffling their feet, pushing cleverly designed wheeled walkers or balancing on their canes, unable to open the doors for themselves, faces a mask of apathy. It's much worse to spend even a few minutes in a nursing home, walking out of a world of relative health of body and mind into an asylum of decay: men and women, once fit and optimistic about the future, now tied to oxygen tanks, raving mad or sunk into almost complete retreat from the outside world, sitting down hours in advance of their meals for lack of any better purpose to their lives, needing help to get out of bed or clean their own wastes. ... We need an intervention that will fundamentally arrest, or reverse, the biological decay that creeps into our every cell with each passing year. Too few people are pushing this agenda. We - the healthy life extension community - must put our hands upon the wheel. If not us, who else, after all?

The first group membership has been opened by Parish Mozdzierz for the Betterhumans community; what will your group be?