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Comments on What's the least traumatic way to integrate resurrected historical humans into modern society?

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What's the least traumatic way to integrate resurrected historical humans into modern society? Question

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In a fictional alternate version of present-day Earth, scientists have found a way to resurrect people from the past en masse. The resurrected will have bodies that resemble their original ones but reset to a viable state (not about to die from whatever killed them, and they won't carry communicable diseases from the past into the present). They will have their memories except for the last few weeks of their original lives, so they won't remember dying.

Society's leaders want to bring back as many past people as will fit, probably several billion.[1] Ultimately, they could bring back everyone from the stone age to people who died yesterday. The project is planned as a one-time event -- bring everyone back once, not make everyone effectively immortal.

How should the leaders of this project ease all those people's integration into modern society?

This is an adaptation of a question that was asked and closed on Worldbuilding SE.


  1. Does the reason they want to bring people back to life matter for this question? ↩︎

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5 comment threads

Magic World? (3 comments)
How much control is there about "who" comes back? (1 comment)
Batches (2 comments)
Are recent deaths excluded? (2 comments)
A broader version of this question was closed on SE, though I thought it was answerable and I answere... (1 comment)
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several billion

That's going to take some serious 'splainin. We already have too many people on this planet, and the number is still growing. You're going to have to provide a really good reason to make this problem worse.

one-time event

A billion people poofing into existance at the same time!? Yikes!! You need to think this thru more carefully.

Long-term integration into society is the easy part. Consider the problems of the first few minutes to days. A billion people are going to need water within hours and food within a day or two. How are you going to store all that ahead of time? distribute it in a short time? Where is all the poop and pee going to go?

Let's do a little math. Let's say you pick a large flat area on earth at a time of decent weather conditions. If all these people appeared in a nice orderly square grid, there would be 32,000 of them on a side. Even at only 3 m separation, that's 95 x 95 kilometers, or about 3,500 square miles. For context, Delaware is 2,500 square miles, and Connecticut 5,500. This doesn't include any infrastructure for logistics of delivering food and water, dealing with sewage, keeping order, somehow trying to explain to a billion confused people what just happened, etc.

"But other than that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?".

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1 comment thread

Number: "leaders want to bring back as many past people *as will fit*". I want to abstract away what ... (1 comment)
Number: "leaders want to bring back as many past people *as will fit*". I want to abstract away what ...
Monica Cellio‭ wrote about 1 month ago

Number: "leaders want to bring back as many past people as will fit". I want to abstract away what that number is, because there are so many unknowns. The world's population has doubled within the last 50 years and recently we've been adding a billion every ~12 years, so while this obviously isn't sustainable, adding large numbers of people doesn't seem out of line. That said, for purposes of this question, I don't care where we cap it; the question is about how to integrate a large number of people who aren't from "now".