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Whether or not it is possible in principle to resurrect everyone who ever lived by careful examination of nearby space dust will be off intense policy importance in a hundred or so years, when we've built the Dyson swarm.
After all, there's a major injustice to be rectified in some people having immortality vs others not, just because if the time they were born. At the same time, we will be facing the question of whether to radically increase human population near our star, and by how much.
Perhaps the resurrection project only takes a few years, using the resources of the sun and a few other nearby stars. But that's vast numbers of people whose very existences will be delayed, far more individuals than ever existed in human history.
So rather than a grand restoration of justice, the act of choosing to bring back the lost humans of history (a few billion) may be seen as a grave injustice! The big question is whether potential lives, unborn and unconcieved *possible* lives, carry significant moral worth.
We may avoid this issue by it simply being impossible to gather enough information in sufficiently coherent form. But it's hard to imagine it being less energy and compute time intensive, if it is possible, than creating some far number of new lives.
One way we might resolve this, given that we today value our forebears, is to make the decision to prioritize the soon efficient creation of a Dyson sphere, and to think of it as a trade in exchange for the resurrection of historical lives in the event it's possible.
Suppose your decisions today can cause the Dyson swarm to be created ten years sooner, and are motivated in part by the chance to give your lost grandparents a future life. That means you justly get a say in it, even if most people later would prefer to increase the population.
It goes further than personal connections, of course. A deeper connection to history achievable by deep scanning the timeline is a wonderful resource for future humans to have... But is it *better* than expanding the population of healthy, happy immortal humans sooner?
