Im surprised Osama Bin Laden has not been mentioned yet

Bin Laden's terrorist actions have forever changed the world we live in. For instance if society was to be told in 1999 that in a few years traveling and security issues will increase tenfold they would probably never see it coming. Not to mention two unpopular costly wars

You're looking at this through a very narrow lense. Bin Lad definitely doesn't make the list. It may have been a shock for the US to suffer a terrorist attack (and there's no disputing how catastrophic it was) but terrorist attacks aren't uncommon.

I don't think Bin Ladin even makes the top 100

Bin Laden's also only been relevant for about the last 20 years at most. I avoided anyone from the last 50 years because it's hard to say how those people will stand the test of time. It's quite possible bin Laden and the "War on Terror" will be little more than a footnote in 100 years.

Way too soon to put bin laden in the top 100.

As of now, the only people from the last 50 years I would put on a top 100 list are Claude Shannon (father of the information age), Norman Borlaug (father of the Green Revolution, which saved over a billion people worldwide from starvation), Martin Luther King Jr., Bill Gates, and maybe Reagan.

lol

I have a huge issue with the Mohammed/Jesus/St Paul even making the lists. To me it's far more important how their messages were interrupted rather than what they wrote or taught. I mean we have no way of knowing what context they and their immediate followers were delivering their message. For me Constantine and Thomas Aquinas are way above them in the list

I would tend to think that ancient conquerors trump everyone. How can someone like Newton compare to the people that shaped the political world in ways that allowed them to do what they did? Is this a bias against the fact that conquerors are people we'd rather remember negatively?

1. Alexander - I really think this goes without saying, but no one's even mentioned him yet. It's easy to say Muhammed because he's considered the founder of a religion that still exists today as well as being a conqueror, but I think Alexander has had more influence. It's just not so obvious, since we don't see Alexanderism in the news every day.

I would think Benjamin Franklin is a historical figure that is often overlooked. Many people are familiar with his experiments with electricity, flying a kite with a key attached into a storm (although that isn't what he actually did), but I'm always amazed at the breadth of what he was involved with.- "Franklin was a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, musician, inventor, satirist, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin

Of all the founding fathers, he probably had the most impact on the creation of the United States, more than Washington, Jefferson, Hancock. He was instrumental in garnering support from the French for Americas fight for independence, which is a big reason we were able to break from English rule. He was one of the pioneers in our understanding of how electricity works, just think where the modern world would be without it. He was one of the early pioneers of a volunteer fire department, which is a system we use to this day. He pioneered the understanding of the Gulf Stream currents in the Atlantic.

Many others I've seen mentioned in the thread are sort of one hit wonders who specialized in one area of human development. Franklin had a wide ranging impact and I believe the world would be a much different place had it not been for him.

I would think Galileo would be in there somewhere.

da Vinci no. 1

His cryptic legacy will endure.

IDK their names, but I think that the people who

• first learned to cook food
• figured out that those hard grass seeds were edible if you ground them up, mixed the resultant powder with water and cooked, it, and
• figured out that you get more plants of the types you liked if you broke up the soil surface and scattered some appropriate seeds

were all pretty influential to human history. Without them, none of the other people mentioned in this thread would have had the opportunity for their own acomplishments.

Those things all were probably discovered thousands of times by people all over the world, so any single group that figured it out on their own isn't that important.

I would say something like the discovery of positional notation with a 0 character since it may well have happened exactly once and obv had a major impact.

IDK a lot about paleoanthropology so I can't really dispute the "thousands of times" claim. I'd think it would be more likely to be hundreds, but I supposes if you count each different plant species domestication as a separate event it could get into the thousands.

In any event, I think you and I are emphasizing two different aspects of the notion of "most influential humans". You're focussing on the individual, and I am focussing on the outcome of the influence. My point is that the development of agriculture, and the shift from mobile hunter-gatherer societies to permanent agricultural communties was the biggest jump in human evolution. It was the step that permanently distinguished the human species from all the other vertibrates. (Perhaps in the steps leading to agriculture I should have included making tools and domestication of animals.)

The development of agriculture led to the first semi-permanent state of food surplus. It was no longer necessary for everybody to spend nearly all their time finding and preparing food. This allowed the development of trade in bulk with deferred delivery (which in turn led to both literacy and numeracy) and non-food related specialty occupations (soldiers, craftsmen). These things, along with free time, led in turn to a vastly increased rate of technological development.

The development (I doubt "discovery" really applies in this case) of positional notation with a 0 is merely one late spin-off from the development of agricultural societies.

There needs to be proof that Jesus existed for him to be on the list. As far as I can tell he might have existed and might be a mythological figure. From what I have read, the 1st references to him in writing are from about 100c. Which would be about 100 years after his death (if he existed).

To me, this makes him a mythological figure and should keep him off this list. It's like putting God on the list.

This has been discussed a lot in RGT, so you can surely look up threads there if you want the real evidence. But what I remember of them, the conclusion is rather clear: a person named Jesus (or Yeshua, right?) almost surely existed, but we don't know much about what he really did.

It doesn't change much in terms of significance whether or not the historical Jesus was one person or an amalgam of several individuals. If the historical Jesus is one man, his significance is huge, if the mythos of Jesus is a mixture of several real people and other myths, all that does is elevate the position of Paul who initially expanded on the mythos.

I would say the years 1933-1945 was the most significant time period in world history, mainly b.c WW2 (and its buildup) was by far the largest war the world has ever seen with stakes that were monumental.

That being said I feel FDR should at least be on the list of "most influential humans". FDR brought a country out of a depression and turned it into the worlds #1 superpower. We should consider all the events that occurred during Roosevelt's tenure as US President.

IMO FDR's diplomatic skill to head the allied powers was above all others, he was able to bring Churchhill and Stalin together and utilize the allied strength to its fullest capability to defeat the axis powers. FDR additionally opened up US and Saudi Arabia relations late in 1945, to this day Saudi Arabia is a crucial ally of the US in the middle east. FDR was also responsible for the formation of the Tuskegee airmen and a pioneer in civil rights advancement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_von_Linde


The inventor of modern refrigeration. Without AC/Refrigeration our modern food system would not exist the way it does. Without AC places like Miami would still be backwater towns not thriving metropolis.

Fair enough on the the thousands.....I think it did occur largely independently on 5 (6?) different continents, again needs to be checked.

Then I would say complicated human language led to thriving hunter gather societies that paved the way for the next step of agriculture. Again not an expert, but won't anthropologists etc say human type languages or proto languages were the greatest leap in human development?

I prefer discovery.....I'm definitely a Platonist about things like the integers and how to display them, but certainly not for all of math.

I have something of an issue with lists like this. A lot of the people are going to get credit for discovering something that if they didn't discover someone else would have. There are exceptions however...

1) Muhammad- important not because he founded a religion but because he made it stick by force and set it up to dominate the region. This gave it a very strong chance of becoming a major force in a region that up to that point had no large scale unified religion.

2) Constantine- You think Jesus founded Christianity? Think again. Before Constantine decided to make Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire it was just another cult with a strangely similar creation story to a great many other cults that had come before it. He chose Christianity so that he could gain control over religion in his Empire ldo.

4) Augustus/Octavian- The roman empire getting a second (larger and more glorious) act wasn't a sure thing. This guy built a system so robust that the next two leaders of his Empire were incompetent and then crazy (yes Caligula) and it went on chugging along without them. For anyone who reads a lot of history you're aware of what an accomplishment this is. Notables who have failed at it include almost every empire builder in history.

3) Confucius- founding a 'religion' that enforces conformity to this extent in a place that needed conformity to that extent was a major unifying thing that helped the Chinese dynasties thrive for a very long time. Such a useful doctrine that the modern Chinese Communist Party is looking to revive it.

4) Columbus- Yeah eventually someone was going to do it, but discovering the new world was pretty damned risky. Hell he was wrong about everything and if this were gambling class instead of history class he'd deserve to die. I honestly think he made his trip across the Atlantic a few years too soon from a shipbuilding point of view. He also sailed too far to be able to get back if he was wrong. All of these add up to him being responsible for the early discovery of the New World.

Honestly these are just people who I think really changed history instead of being there at the right time/place. I'm talking about people who made choices that lead to major shifts in the direction of history. Forget a top ten list.. It's pretty hard to even find people who fit this.

Well, Columbus certainly is an exception. Instead of getting "credit for discovering something that if they didn't discover someone else would have" he got credit for discovering something that had already been independently discovered at least twice and probably many times more. At least Columbus was unique among the discoverers in thinking he hadn't discovered a new place at all. He went to his grave asserting what he had found was a new route to an old place: Asia.

Also ironic is that you suggest "he made his trip across the Atlantic a few years too soon from a shipbuilding point of view", when those who got there across the Atlantic half a millennium before him did so with much older shipbuilding technology, and those who came to the New World several millennia earlier didn't use ships.

He certainly was influential though. He personally was responsible for instituting both the trans-Atlantic slave trade (in both directions) and what may have been the first genocide to kill over one million people.

We're talking influence for good or evil here. I agree about the effects of his influence. The earlier explorers did what they did using a different route and because of their extremely lacking shipbuilding they didn't stick.

I'm not making the 'columbus as a great man' argument here. I'm basically saying he was an idiot who convinced people to make a very bad investment from a Reward/Risk point of view that happened to pay off pretty ****ing hard. Him claiming to have found Asia on his deathbed is further proof of this. Basically when it comes to being influential sometimes it really is better to be lucky than good.

OK, we agree about the nature of his influence. What I was disagreeing with was that the only thing you mentioned about Columbus having done or influenced was having discovered the New World. You mention this twice. And that is what he is most widely mis-remembered for. However he wasn't the first (or even the first European) to discover the New World. What you don't mention is the direct influences he actually did have, which is what I brought up. If you want to give him credit for a history-altering discovery, make it the European discovery of gold in the New World. Of course, he took it as a given he would find gold in Asia, given Marco Polo's descriptions, so he didn't consider finding gold to have been a new discovery. When you mention "earlier explorers" I am not sure that you are referring to the same people I am. The first people to discover the New World were Asian nomads, sometime between 15,000 and 40,000 years ago. Their descencdants were the first people to discover gold in the New World. The Captain of the first European ship to discover the New World was either Gunnbjorn Ulfsson or Bjarni Herjulfsson (depending on whether one considers Greenland to be part of the New World). Neither Gunnbjorn nor Bjarni were explorers. They were traders blown off course by storms.

Inadequate shipbuilding had nothing to do with the failure of the Norse colonies in Greenland and Canada. (There is an argument that Norse knarrs were actually a more capable design than Spanish caravelles.) The Greenland colonies eventually failed because of climate change. The Canadian colonization attempts failed because of insufficient critical mass, and a combination of poor diplomacy and insufficiently advantaged weapons systems. Both groups of colonies failed because their products were not sufficiently valuable and the homeland on which the were based was too small to provide adequate investment for colonial self-sufficiency.
Perhaps Columbus was less an idiot than some people think. Columbus wasn't original in thinking the world was round and that one could reach Asia from Europe by sailing west. He shared the consensus view that the earth was a sphere and that the land mass of Europe/Asia/Africa and its offshore islands was all the land there was, surrounded by the ocean. The reason nobody had tried a westward voyage to Asia was that the approximately correct calculations of the day showed that it would be too far a trip to consider.

There is good reason to consider that Columbus undertook the voyage because practical knowledge he acquired about the distance westward across the ocean to land indicated it was far less than the prevailing theoretical westward distance to Asia. This knowledge would have come from seafarers and documentary sources. The news of the Norse discoveries was available in southern Europe. Adam of Bremen had written about the Norse discoveries in the 11th century. Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir, the woman who gave birth to the first European born in the New World - Snorri Thorfinnson - made a pilgramage to Rome about one generation before Adam's writings. There is reason to believe Basque fishermen had been fishing off Newfoundland for years before Columbus. The knowledge of Vinland was not lost in Iceland and Iceland was trading with western Europe. Columbus's son, Fernando, wrote about his father having visited Iceland and a land to its west fifteen years before his famous voyage of "discovery".

So there is a very real reason to believe that Columbus may have heard about land across the Ocean and that this gave rise to his estimate of the distance he thought he had to go. Faced with practical evidence from seafarers apparently contradicting the theories of mathematicians, Columbus chose to believe the stories, and to believe that part of the theory was wrong. His mistake was to choose to believe that the circumference calculation was wrong while the "one land mass" idea was correct.
Some say the same applies to winning donkaments. Others say you need to be both good and lucky.

There's actually an answer to this question.

The most influential human in world history is Scipio Africanus. The Roman general who defeated the Carthaginian armies of Hannibal, decisively routing them at the Battle of Zama.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Zama

Without his military leadership Hannibal would have likely been unstoppable, Rome would have been conquered, the Roman Empire would have never existed, Jesus Christ and almost all of the other people mentioned on any of these lists would have never existed, and the Western world would have developed under the reign of Carthage for likely hundreds of years.