After a person dies, how long is their SSN kept inactive before it can be used again?

There will be a whole new system by then. DNA or Retina Scans or RFID chips or something.

Not only that. When I went to college, I put my social security number, along with my name, on all of my stuff. A lot of people did that. The idea was that if something was stolen, the social security number would help to identify it as yours when it was recovered. Nobody would dare do that today, but identity theft wasn’t as big a thing back then.

My colleges were forward thinking (or NIH) enough that they issued us student ID numbers.

But yeah, that number went on everything I might leave lying around someplace on / near campus. It identified me as a student to fellow students and who I was to the administration. Double win!

The U.S. State Department started issuing passport numbers with a leading upper-case letter (A, X, Y, or Z) several years ago.

I suspect they will do something like what was done for IPv6 where they went big.

In England, the National Health Service Number you got at birth in 1961 is not the same as the one you’ve got now. (Still got the brown card they issued back then). So they must have changed it all at some point.
The National Insurance number is different again. It was supposedly the same as your wartime identity card number, if you were that old, but I’ve found one of my mother’s wartime diaries with a note of her identity card number written in the front and it’s not the same.