Maybe I wasn't even as clear as I intended, but I read it as: Now that this change has happened, 'putting the genie back in the bottle' would take an enorm

Maybe I wasn't even as clear as I intended, but I read it as: Now that this change has happened, 'putting the genie back in the bottle' would take an enormous amount of time. Even if there was a dedicated, directed effort to do so, we would probably be talking time-scales of millennia rather than things that us humans would actually be able to look forward to (even a couple of generations forward).