Hello Freethinkers,
To help curb global warming, some people buy paper straws, reusable grocery bags, or energy-efficient light bulbs.
Luke Iseman had more direct plans. “I bought a couple hundred dollars of balloons on Amazon, a tank of helium, and some sulfur powder, and we were off to the races,” Iseman, cofounder of Make Sunsets, told Freethink.
Those biodegradable balloons ascend to the stratosphere, where they eventually burst, releasing particles that reflect sunlight back into space. This week, Future Explored charts the origins of this 50-year-old concept — and whether it may prove a realistic way to cool the planet.
Onward,
Stephen
FUTURE EXPLORED
The startup using balloons to cool the planet
Earth has been heating up over the last century, and this century isn’t looking promising, either. While clean energy is cheaper than ever, greenhouse emissions and global temperatures are still rising. There is a desperate tactic that could buy us more time to get CO2 emissions under control — if it doesn’t destroy the ozone layer. It would only cost a few billion dollars, and there’s already a startup taking the first baby steps toward trying it.
FREETHINK FEATURES
No, LLMs still can’t reason like humans. This simple test reveals why.
AIs are so smart that they routinely ace all kinds of tests, from university exams and SATs to the bar exam and MCAT. But their failures of common sense and simple logic, and the ease with which they are fooled, will leave you scratching your head. Here’s why large language models still can’t reason like people — and a way to measure how close they’re really getting to reproducing human-level intelligence.
IN THE KNOW
Adopting generative AI
Is the generative AI boom just hype? A recent survey suggests the answer is no, finding that the adoption rate of generative AI is comparable or faster than the adoption of computers and the internet was decades ago. The results show that 24% of U.S. workers use generative AI at least once a week.
MORE ON THIS STORY
WORTH SHARING
Sara Imari Walker: Using physics to rethink the definition of life
What if we discovered something on a distant planet that seemed to be alive but lacked the biological markers we associate with life on Earth: carbon-based molecules, water-based reactions, and complex biochemical pathways? Life might take wildly different forms across the Universe. To better define life here and throughout the cosmos, Walker’s Assembly Theory suggests we should focus on the complexity and arrangement of matter itself, looking for systems that show the hallmarks of organized, information-rich structures that transcend specific chemistry.
Stephen Johnson is the managing editor at Big Think and a writer at Freethink.