Make Sunsets

“I think a swift regulatory or political backlash to, like, totally unfettered solar geoengineering is probably the right thing.”

“There's no federal regulation that prohibits someone from putting some of that burned sulfur in a balloon and letting it go.”

“Their first experimental launch in the Mexican state of Baja resulted in a swift regulatory response from the Mexican government, but undeterred, they were ready to run another test, and a few weeks ago, they launched some more balloons just outside of Reno, N…”

“Like, if you've ever done a massive bong hit, like, it's, let's, it's not, it sounds, a bong hit is worse than, you know, what you're gonna inhale in terms of the pain.”

“So we got, got clearance by the FAA. Like, we just got issued a NOTAM.”

“I don't really see this effort as relating to geoengineering. Actually, like it's basically performance. You could call it performance art. I don't know if it meets the threshold of art, but it's more of like a performance that is meant to be. A provocation or…”

“They really, at this point, don't have any way to measure whether or not they're actually releasing the proper amount of sulfur if it's making it into the stratosphere, and it's, you know, easy, like these just round, easy numbers of correlation from, well, on…”

“Luke Eisman is a serial entrepreneur. He worked at Y Combinator for a while as their head of hardware, director of hardware.”

“Any single person you talk to in solar geoengineering research, whether they're the most bullish on it or the strongest against it, they all think that what Make Sunset's doing is a bad idea.”

“When the rubber meets the road, they need someone like me to actually, that's it. The scientists that create the Saturn B rocket didn't go into space. It was some monkey first, right? We're the monkey, we're not an astronaut.”

“I mean, the main danger is that it inhibits the very real research that we need, because people are too alarmed from the whole topic, or they just write it off, and then the scientists, who I hope would be doing the good work on this, can't continue their work…”

“There is another startup called Make Sunsets, which a lot of people have heard about, who has decided to just do SRM brazenly in the open, kind of flouting all rules and regulations to the extent that they can. I actually went to a party a couple years ago whe…”