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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
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.
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Does the reason they want to bring people back to life matter for this question? ↩︎
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Most recent first, and with a support structure.
Somebody who died 3000 years ago will be baffled by today's world. Somebody who died last week probably won't be.
So don't start with the ones from 3000 years ago. Start with the most-recently departed, teach them the essential post-mortem changes, and then enlist their aid with the next-earlier wave.
Somebody who died 50 years ago will be surprised and confused by some things, and a modern person won't be able to anticipate all of them. But somebody who died 45 years ago will have a pretty good idea of what that person is going through, having also just made the adjustment. So as you work backwards, each "class" of recently revived helps the next class, i.e. the next-earlier ones, adjust. For best results, you should match up mentors and revived with as many similarities as possible -- same culture, same language, similar socio-economic groups, etc. You want to take advantage of shared background and shared context, just like some immigrant communities do today.
In many cases the best matches come from family members, even if this means larger differences in time of death, but there are caveats that might make this harder to do on a large scale. If you had a good relationship with your grandpa, you're in a good position to help him acclimate. If he had a good relationship with his grandparents, he can do the same. However, not all families have good dynamics, and you don't, for example, want to put a vindictive kid mad about the inheritance, or someone who was a victim of parental abuse, in charge of acclimating those parents. To mitigate this, have groups work with groups (not individual mentorship pairings), and make a family match only if both parties agree.
Another benefit of starting with the most recent is that if you're concerned about running out of capacity before you run out of historical people, you have a clean cutoff in time. That will be easier to explain and justify.
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