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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? ↩︎
4 answers
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The past is a foreign country.
The people resurrected from the past are much like people immigrating from undeveloped countries into developed ones. Especially the way these immigrants were in past years, when communication technology was less advanced and cultural differences were larger. An extreme example is the case of Europeans in 16-19th centuries bringing native people from the Americas and Southeast Asia to European capitals where they no doubt suffered much culture shock.
Resurrected people would be administered similarly to immigrants. The immigration authority of each country would form a special division and handle them much like refugees. They would be guided through receiving necessary paperwork, informed of their basic rights and obligations (such as current taxes) and initially put on some form of government assistance. The government would provide language and cultural classes at various levels if necessary and help them find suitable jobs to get started in society.
Much like immigration today, there would be a tiered system where certain people would be prioritized. For example, those with skills, education and cultural familiarity (and thus able to contribute better to the economy) might get a fast track process. Famous people might have greatly accelerated screening or even be exempt from it. People from periods with political climates opposed to the current one would be subjected to rigorous security screening to ensure they won't rebel, commit crimes or engage in terrorism against the country they were resurrected to. People from "unpopular" periods might have a much harder time going through the process due to public perceptions. Those with family (descendants) willing to support them would have a much easier time.
This scenario is effectively a massively amplified migration crisis. Compared to today's immigrants, even from very extreme places, the resurrected people are even more unbalanced: They have more unique skills and talents but they require more adjustment, since they didn't grow up with TV and the internet. There would doubtless be many ordinary people stuck in the immigration system. Some would try to work and live illegally, some would try to escape to other countries and claim refugee or stateless status.
One assumes there would be various private organization that prey on the resurrected in various ways, such as overcharging them for dubious legal assistance, selling services (horse carriage insurance?) that they don't yet realize are worthless, hiring them to work in unfair conditions and abusing government grants or subsidies. Probably criminal ones as well, that do the same thing, but without even the veneer of following the law.
Much like today, some resurrected will form their own enclaves where they live in a state closer to their native culture. For example, in big cities you might have Victorian towns, Medieval towns, Roman towns that where people prefer to speak their own language, have many grocery stores and restaurants of their own culture. Contemporary people who are interested in these time periods would frequent these for the exotic experience. If the community is large enough, brands might develop that specifically provide products for these subcultures, such as Victorian-style snuff and snuffbox vendors. In some ways, inevitably they would take on modernisms, so you would have the "peasants" in the medieval town carry around phones so they can call their business associates much like some Amish do. Particularly in places like North America, there would probably be some massive socioeconomic consequences as huge numbers of natives arrive in reservations (they would certainly be fast tracked in today's political climate), and demand new ones to be formed.
Some innocent expressions or habits of today would become taboo. For example, to say someone is "backwards" or "from the stone age" might become unacceptable because it harms certain groups of resurrected people. There would probably be a new set of politically correct euphemisms to talk about people's temporal origins without giving the appearance of offending anyone.
Luminaries of past times (statesmen, writers, scientists, artists) would be offered honorary professorship or similar positions at institutions, where their day to day is participating on committees, writing commentary on current events, sitting as advisors on various boards, teaching broad freshman classes and attending ceremonies. People who were once geniuses that changed the world, would now be trapped in futile positions where they have no real power, are showered with empty praise, and used by the parent organization as a mascot and marketing gimmick. Tesla would be hired by MIT, but never actually do any invention, and instead would be stuck making Youtube videos that advertise electric car subsidies, where he is forced to wear period attire and affect an old timey accent event though in his personal life he is well integrated into his new time period. Perhaps he would attempt to invent again, be blocked by the institution, sue for discrimination, and end up precipitating a constitutional amendment which adds "time period of origin" as a protected class - something which will become largely irrelevant in a decade or two (since the resurrection is a one-time event), but every office worker will still have to sit through trainings about it forever. And then perhaps you will have ordinary people, who simply enjoy historic cosplay, claiming the time period protections and demanding to show up to work at the bank in a loincloth.
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.
I'd worry more about society than the resurrected individuals, I think.
Specifically, I think that people (in general) have enough adaptability that, despite how we portray them in science fiction, you could probably tell an ancient person "yeah, we have indoor plumbing and talk to people over Zoom, now," and they'll learn to live with it. Actually, if I remember correctly, people getting indoor plumbing today often need more reinforcement than people getting telecommunications, because they (fairly legitimately) don't like high toilets, even if it means less disease.
By contrast, we've spent a lot of (especially recent) history struggling to overcome caste, sexism, casual violence, and more. I'd worry much more about unleashing millions or billions of people who don't believe in science or human rights, but do enjoy animal torture...and also want to use the local park as their bathroom.
That maybe gets to the caveat in the question of why they want to bring so many people back, because learning about history first hand differs from a labor force, which has different weird boundaries than a politically regressive voting bloc...
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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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