Should private companies be able to dim the sun? Solar geoengineering aims to manipulate the climate by bouncing sunlight back into space. In theory, it could ease global warming. But as interest in the idea grows, so do concerns about potential consequences. A startup called Stardust Solutions recently raised a $60 million funding round, the largest known to date for a geoengineering startup. My colleague James Temple has a new story out about the company, and how its emergence is making some researchers nervous.

And why many scientists are freaked out about the first serious for-profit company moving into the solar geoengineering field. Stardust Solutions believes that it can solve climate change--for a price. The Israel-based geoengineering startup has said it expects nations will soon pay it more than a billion dollars a year to launch specially equipped aircraft into the stratosphere. Once they've reached the necessary altitude, those planes will disperse particles engineered to reflect away enough sunlight to cool down the planet, purportedly without causing environmental side effects. The proprietary (and still secret) particles could counteract all the greenhouse gases the world has emitted over the last 150 years, the company stated in a 2023 pitch deck it presented to venture capital firms. In fact, it's the "only technologically feasible solution" to climate change, the company said. The company disclosed it raised $60 million in funding in October, marking by far the largest known funding round to date for a startup working on solar geoengineering.

The gloomy arguments in favor of solar geoengineering are compelling; so are the even gloomier counter-arguments. Stardust is the name of a small startup with enormous ambitions. The company, which is based in Israel and registered in Delaware, proposes to do nothing less than dim the sun. Its business plan is modelled on volcanoes. In a major eruption, millions of tons of sulfur dioxide get thrown up into the stratosphere.

Adobe plans to announce a ridiculously cool photo editor at Adobe Max, dubbed Project Stardust, that uses AI to understand objects in your photos as…objects -- allowing you to quickly edit and modify them. Adobe released a teaser for Project Stardust on YouTube, where Adobe employees showed off how Stardust could "understand" that a photo of a woman pulling a suitcase was made up of discrete objects. Simply by clicking on the suitcase, Stardust appears to understand that it's an object, and that it can be moved around or deleted. Though somewhat late to the AI party (following the launch of Midjourney and other early examples of AI art generators), Adobe launched its Firefly AI generative tool last year and quickly added AI features like outpainting to Photoshop before adding Firefly to Photoshop via generative art tools, albeit with a credit plan. Now, Adobe seems poised to take the next step.