Andrew Song: Global Cooling with Sulfur Dioxide in the Stratosphere — #91

Andrew Song is a co-founder of Make Sunsets, a company focused on addressing climate change through solar geoengineering. The company launches balloons filled with sulfur dioxide (SO2) into the stratosphere with the aim of reflecting sunlight to cool the Earth.https://makesunsets.com/Previous Manifold episodes on climate:https://www.manifold1.com/episodes/casey-handmer-terraform-industries-and-a-carbon-neutral-future-57https://www.manifold1.com/episodes/tim-palmer-status-and-future-of-climate-modeling-16https://www.manifold1.com/episodes/klaus-lackner-on-carbon-capture-climate-change-and-physics-40Steve and Andrew discuss:(00:00) - Introduction (01:35) - Andrew's Background and Swimming Career (06:37) - Journey into Startups and Y Combinator Experience (11:30) - Make Sunsets: Concept and Science (32:53) - Exploring Supersonic and Balloon-Based Solutions (33:45) - Environmental Concerns and Biodegradable Solutions (36:13) - Business Model and Cooling Credits (39:26) - Future Prospects and Climate Modeling Challenges Music used with permission from Blade Runner Blues Livestream improvisation by State Azure.–Steve Hsu is Professor of Theoretical Physics and of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at Michigan State University. Previously, he was Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation at MSU and Director of the Institute of Theoretical Science at the University of Oregon. Hsu is a startup founder (SuperFocus.ai, SafeWeb, Genomic Prediction, Othram) and advisor to venture capital and other investment firms. He was educated at Caltech and Berkeley, was a Harvard Junior Fellow, and has held faculty positions at Yale, the University of Oregon, and MSU. Please send any questions or suggestions to [email protected] or Steve on X @hsu_steve. Announcing this for some friends at Mechanize - a startup that builds environments for training and evaluating frontier LLMs. Its customers include the top AI labs, and it has contributed to the breakthrough in coding capabilities of frontier models. Mechanize is hiring! https://mechanize.work/b/hsu Compensation is extremely competitive. For technical roles, $300-500k. They are also seeking smart generalists. For example: Research Engineer, Alignment: Build evals that test for misaligned model behaviors  $500K salary Puzzle Maker: Design interesting and original puzzles that LLMs can’t yet solve  $300K salary Mechanize understands that my readership is highly selected. There is a VERY GOOD CHANCE you will be interviewed if you apply via the link above.