Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

by Elizabeth Kolbert

“We’re not talking about coral gardening here,” Hardisty told me. “We’re talking about major, industrial-scale—all-of-reef-scale—interventions. So it’s a really steep curve, but it’s possible—that’s what we’ve concluded—with the best minds in the world, all working together.” To aid in the research effort, the SeaSim was going to be expanded; if I came back in a few years, Hardisty said, it would be twice the size. “It won’t be a silver bullet,” he continued. “It’s going to be a combination of things, combinations of, for instance, cloud-brightening and assisted evolution. We’re going to need engineering, because we are looking at fast deployment to make a difference. And we’re also going to need to borrow technologies from Big Pharma, because we’ve got to figure out mass-delivery mechanisms. Maybe—I don’t know—we’ll use little pellets.”