Aliens have come and kidnapped the first human they came across, unfortunately, that was you. They take you to a new planet almost identical to our current Earth, but without anything man-made.
The aliens say you can have 1 million real humans to start “New Earth” and you can put them anywhere and teach them anything you want. You’ll have 1,000 years to make a good New Earth and if the Aliens like it, you’ll get to keep it, if not they will blow it up and try again with someone else. You will have access to old Earths internet so you will have the choice on what technologies you introduce and when. You live in the ship, but you can choose to pop in and out of New Earth as you please. You will not be burdened with all 1 million humans at once. You can choose to add a small number of them at a time until you get the proper resources established.
Edit: The humans can reproduce, and will unless you implement some form of birth control to prevent them from doing so. Also the first 1 million humans will start with the basic knowledge of how to human and you can pick personality traits for them, like you would a Sim, but the babies they make are blank slates.
You don’t have to try and make it a good society, you can choose to watch the world burn for 1,000 years. Up to you.
I’m curious on how you reconcile the “towns not much larger than 700 people” and the advanced automation you have in your world.
Drones, computers, or any of the 15 layers you need to support any “network” need significantly more people than groups of 700 to manufacture.
So you have a supply chain now. Very centralized, mostly for control and property reasons yeah? Found out how we don’t really need to work in the offices over covid yeah? So one town they mine, or harvest some natural resource that’s the main production at that town apart from the personal food production and culture and art, you want to mine or whatever you move there. Nearby is another town, all they do is process the stuff the other town mines/gathers and prepare it for shipment, if that seems like a nice job to you you move there now it starts getting more complicated. for every step in the supply chain between towns that are too far away to retrieve the resources you build a town that just moves things from one town to another. We have 1428.5 towns to build. Do you think that is enough to start a decentralized society? How about after 19 years and everybody’s hookups have borne a new generation of townsfolk? How complex could our infrastructure become after 2 generations? How many more towns from your great grandkids? I live a thousand years, that’s only what? oldest grandkids turning 18 like 38 years? And I have the internet and all the tech currently available? Look what the Chinese peasants did in 75 years after a bloody revolution. I don’t even have to murder anyone these aliens apparently gave me copies of people who are willing to go along with this little experiment. It won’t take many of my thousand years for my collective to cover the planet with very content small groups of people building one piece of a puzzle that when completed benefits them all. I mean china just ran a marathon with bipedal robots and I saw someplace else someone is teaching them hand to hand combat I don’t think we would have trouble improving on that to automate away most of the manual labor in say 100 years. Sure it would be pretty subsistence at first when we are settling the first million and coordinating the supply chain, the first generation will probably be mostly building towns and farming in places their children will possibly be able to utilize but it snowballs quickly considering how many years I’m managing this thing