Most likely the information about humans who lived in the distant past has been permanently erased by various processes.
It is not possible to resurrect “all” humans—the space is too large. I estimate that there are roughly 10^11 bits of information to fully specify a human mind such that the remaining error is within normal day-to-day fluctuations i.e. normal existence. Thus the space of all humans has about 2(1011) points, which is approximately 10(1010).
I think a combination of DNA + social media history might come pretty close for people in the modern era.
But anyone from before the computer age who was cremated is gone for good. The DNA is pretty important in get you to the required number of bits.
I think we should not assume that our current understanding of physics is complete, as there are known gaps and major contradictions, and no unifying theory yet.
Thus, there is some chance that future discoveries will allow us to do things that are currently considered impossible. Not only computationally impossible but also physically impossible (like it was “physically impossible” to slow down time, until we discovered relativity).
The hypothetical future capabilities may or may not include ways to retrieve arbitrary information from the distant past (like the chronoscope of science fiction), and may or may not include ways to do astronomical-scale calculations in finite time (like enumerating 10^10^10 possible minds).
While I agree with you that much of the described speculations are currently not in the realm of possibility, I think it’s worth exploring them. Perhaps there is a chance.
Most likely the information about humans who lived in the distant past has been permanently erased by various processes.
It is not possible to resurrect “all” humans—the space is too large. I estimate that there are roughly 10^11 bits of information to fully specify a human mind such that the remaining error is within normal day-to-day fluctuations i.e. normal existence. Thus the space of all humans has about 2(1011) points, which is approximately 10(1010).
I think a combination of DNA + social media history might come pretty close for people in the modern era.
But anyone from before the computer age who was cremated is gone for good. The DNA is pretty important in get you to the required number of bits.
I think we should not assume that our current understanding of physics is complete, as there are known gaps and major contradictions, and no unifying theory yet.
Thus, there is some chance that future discoveries will allow us to do things that are currently considered impossible. Not only computationally impossible but also physically impossible (like it was “physically impossible” to slow down time, until we discovered relativity).
The hypothetical future capabilities may or may not include ways to retrieve arbitrary information from the distant past (like the chronoscope of science fiction), and may or may not include ways to do astronomical-scale calculations in finite time (like enumerating 10^10^10 possible minds).
While I agree with you that much of the described speculations are currently not in the realm of possibility, I think it’s worth exploring them. Perhaps there is a chance.