[ExI] Time travel brainscans

[MB]

:)  You should write a book, it sounds like a good story!  Go for it. I'd
be happy to read such a tale.

Regards,
MB



On Mon, July 14, 2025 17:16, Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat wrote:
> A thought experiment:
>
> Assume that, some centuries in the future, time travel is invented but
> it is the "you already did that" type: anything that future people do
> in the past, was already done in the past.  They can for instance
> record information that would have (appeared) lost, but for instance,
> no assassinating Hitler before history recorded his suicide.
>
> So, they get to brainscanning every human who has been alive, just
> before their death, with an eye toward resurrection.  They have some
> cutoff for what counts - e.g., any embryo that does not make it to
> sustained survival outside of/independent from the womb likely
> wouldn't be scanned, and the cutoff might be somewhat later.  Homo
> sapiens only; the exact boundary depends on historical snapshots they
> take to determine the exact path by which the species arose.  There
> might be some cases that are beyond their initial capability; these
> get flagged for later.
>
> Some current estimates of how many humans have ever lived come in a
> bit over 100 billion.  Let us assume it is no more than 150 billion -
> not counting those then alive, who can be scanned without time travel
> - by the time of this project.  If they can achieve an average pace of
> 100 scans per worker per day - 4.8 minutes per scan on average - and
> assuming 250 working days per year, a workforce of a million (not
> counting oversight/coordination and other support personnel, but
> likely less than 1.1 million including them) could get this done in 6
> years, likely a little longer due to inefficiencies and time to hunt
> down hard-to-find cases.
>
> This would be well within the scope of large human projects.  A
> workforce that large would almost certainly divide up by interest -
> these people focus on the ancient Roman era, that group takes on North
> and South America up to somewhere around first European contact (aside
> from the Vikings) - so long as overlaps are sorted and unaddressed
> areas taken care of eventually (likely toward the end of the project).
> Actual resurrection might be handled by another group, perhaps in
> batches including orientation of historical people to then-modern
> society.
>
> This might explain the phenomena sometimes reported, of near-death
> people experiencing going through a tunnel only to perceive some
> consciousness saying it is not their time and sending them back to
> life.  Or it could be just random musing, of no more impact on reality
> than the particulars of a typical dream.
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