ChatGPT & DALL-E generated panoramic image of a Caribbean underwater view with a coral reef being printed by a large 3d printer, a US materials scientist who is leading a global research project on coral reef restoration, on my podcast Redefining Energy – Tech. In the theme of providing transcripts of presentations I’m giving in various places for people who prefer the written word, this is the lightly edited transcript of the second half of our conversation.
I think that’s kind of where my brain is going now. This is my hypothesis based upon discussing this with you and some of the reading I did before prepping for this. Where are you guys actually going? Am I even in the ballpark?Sort of.One of my colleagues is Forest Rohr, and he has an interesting idea that we’re also working on with him that is called arcs, and these are floating structures.
We’re talking about machines, biological machines the size of rice that build 350,000 km², massive offshore structures over thousands of years.Every time I start exploring aspects of it, it’s really apparent most people never bother to look at the math in terms of the scale. It’s really challenging. Your team has spent time looking at the scale.
You could assist that by, for example, when you capture your gametes, you could bring them over to that colony, and you could tent that colony and release your larvae in there, and that would sort of trap them and sort of force them to land there. But if it’s a different species, then those two species might fight and kill each other. It has to be larvae from the same species and maybe even the same colony.
They have these septae that kind of divide it. If you slice an orange transversely and you see these septae that separate the boats of the orange. It’s kind of like that. They have these skeletal walls, but they also have kind of a skeletal pedestal that they are on, and then the soft tissue surrounds that.Okay. I think I was mistaking them for one of the species, which actually retreats inside its shell, but they surround the carbonaceous material much more. They built the pedestal.