I'm not bothering to read every post. I read the first one and a handful. I've thought about this long before this post came out. The undeniable first place winner, hands down, is Saul of Tarsus, i.e. the Apostle Paul. There is no proof that Jesus ever existed and Paul seems to know nothing of his "earthly life." It was Paul who spread Christianity all over Europe and Asia Minor, not the 12 apostles of the gospels (again, they may not have all existed either). Christianity would have likely died as an unknown Jewish sect were it not for Paul. Instead it became the colossal religion it did.

Further, were it not for Christianity there would be no Islam since Mohammed would have had nothing to plagiarize, and poorly at that. Europe, and by extension the "new world" were largely shaped by Christianity and it was the biggest influence on the world we live in today. To be clear I am an atheist and no fan of religion. But as a poker player I am honest with the situation, calling it as it is. Any other person on this list may be your favorite or someone you think is underappreciated. But to answer who is "the most influential human" ever, that is easy--Saul of Tarsus. Just try to imagine the world now had he died of a heart attack before going on his first missionary journey. Chris Moneymaker is number 2.

You would hope not, but when I talk to most 20-somethings today, almost none of them can tell me who Stalin or Mao Zedong were. Where Genghis Khan or Hannibal were from is a total mystery to them as well. And besides Julius Caesar most would find it impossible to name a single other Roman Emperor. A broad scope of history is just not important to our "create-a-job-specific-tool" education system. Sigh.

Julius Caesar wasn't a Roman Emperor

You are correct sir. He was dictator in perpetuity. Not a bad gig.

"Perpetuity" turned out to be rather short.

Sulla was appointed dictator under the Lex Valeria (Valerian law), which vested constituent, legislative, military, and judicial power in him, without, however, for the first time in Rome’s history, limiting the duration of his dictatorship.

Sulla was dictator from the end of 82 to 79 B.C. He stepped down voluntarily.

Nikola Tesla
Isus Hrist (if he even exist)
Aristotel
Alexander the Great
Buda
James Watt
Mayer Amschel Rothschild
Фёдор Михайлович Достоевски

If it is okay to put my list, here it is:
(top 100)
I apologize if I shouldn't have put it.
I was going for diversity. That's why you see a lot of big names not being on there, lol.

1. "Mitochondrial Eve"
2. Otto von Guericke
3. Cyrus II
4. Johannes Gutenberg
5. Muhammed
6. James Watt
7. Christopher Columbus
8. Carl Bosch
9. Isaac Newton
10. Genghis Khan
11. Aristotle
12. Homer
13. "ancestor of all that has natural blue eyes"
14. Louis Pasteur
15. William Paterson
16. Charles Darwin
17. Malcolm McLean
18. Mehmed II
19. James Clerk Maxwell
20. Tiglath-Pileser III
21. Abbes Sieyes
22. Alhacen
23. Li Si
24. Euclid
25. Julius Caesar
26. Claude Shannon
27. Edward Coke
28. Justinian I
29. Maharshi Veda Vyasa
30. Karl Marx
31. Brahmagupta
32. Alexander Fleming
33. Cai Lun
34. Martin Luther
35. Francis Russell (Duke of Bedford)
36. Menes/Narmer
37. Napoleon Bonaparte
38. Alyattes/Alyattes II
39. Johann van Oldenbarnevelt
40. John Snow
41. Thespis
42. Abu Bakr
43. Luca Pacioli
44. Edwin Drake
45. Gavrilo Princep
46. Marquess of Shen
47. Thomas Edison
48. David Ogilvy
49. Sundiata Keita
50. Harun al-Rashid
51. Adam Smith
52. John Montagu (Earl of Sandwich)
53. Richard Arkwright
54. Robert Peel
55. Ebenezer Cobb Morley
56. Parameswara
57. Peter Peregrinus of Maricourt
58. John Locke
59. Norbert Weiner
60. Charles Frederick Worth
61. Nicolas Appert
62. Friedrich Wohler
63. Elvis Presley
64. Dhabhani
65. George Cayley
66. Cesare Beccaria
67. Simon Stevin
68. John Smeaton
69. Pericles
70. Boulanger
71. Sumu-Abum
72. Gratian
73. Henry Bessemer
74. Vasili Arkhipov
75. Carl Wilhelm Scheele
76. Russell Marker
77. Saints Cyril and Methodius
78. Zhong Yao
79. Wilhelm von Humboldt
80. Otto Hahn/Lise Meitner
81. Thomas Cook
82. William Cullen
83. Hugh Capet
84. Norman Borlaug
85. Henrietta Lacks
86. Charles Henry Brent
87. Otto von Bismarck
88. Sanford Fleming
89. James Bonsack
90. William Shockley, Walter Brittain, John Bardeen
91. Henry Ford
92. Hennig Brandt
93. Charles Gordon Greene
94. Henry Luce
95. Charles Augustus Fey
96. James Ritty
97. Rachel Carson
98. Elizabeth Arden
99. Professor Ludovico Brunetti
100. Matthew Prior

This is just an opinion-based list not based on any system of determination, lol.

This post hasn't gotten enough love. Paul/Saul was clearly the most influential Christian and thus likely the most influential person in history.

And the Chris Moneymaker punchline is brilliant

But Second Temple Judaism was what made Judaism an exclusive monotheism and Second Temple Judaism only came about because Cyrus allowed the Jews to return home and rebuild the temple. Christianity actually started out as a sect of Second Temple Judaism.

Constantine might be more influential Paul because he injected political power into Christianity, so Christianity's influence on a political level can largely be directly attributed to him.

Impossible to compare people from different eras - the further back you go the more pronounced the butterfly effect is. The guy who convinced his tribe to head north east out of africa 50,000 years ago gets top honors by some measures.

Relative to the time they lived in though constantine beats out most of the people on these lists - the scope of the change attributable to him in his lifetime makes him stand out.

I personally think that anybody big associated with nitrogen fertilizer or getting the germ theory of disease accepted are more influential than Constantine, Jesus, Paul, Luther, or etc.

The germ-theory of disease is really important if you think about people's attitudes towards cleanliness in the past and our attitudes of it in the present, lol. In Victorian England, people rarely bathed, poop and rotting things were everywhere, etc. In Roman times, people used urine to clean their clothes and wash out their teeth, and they shared sponges to wipe their butts of poop, etc. Those are just some tamer examples, lol.

I believe the germ-theory of disease had a much more perception changing revolution than Darwin's theories to the modern mind, lol.

Scientific discoveries are built on a foundation of knowledge that make each successful step somewhat of an inevitability and often there're people working towards the same truths independently. Ie: the telephone, calculus, the lightbulb etc. The infrastructure that allows these ideas to be formalized and laid as foundation for our canon of scientific thought is what's responsible for it being influential. Taking that infrastructure into account - you could eliminate the inventor of any particular technology and it would likely just push back the timeline by 5-10 years.

Looking at people like constantine - there's nothing inevitable about the spread of christianity. It was woven into the lives of almost all of europe, parts of asia and most of north africa within his rule (never mind it's lasting impact).

There are remarkable people in science, too. Take William Gilbert. Electricity was barely even thought of before he came along. Some intellectuals just thought it was a cool phenomenon and thought nothing of it past that, lol. After him, many started investigating it and now it is an integral part of the global society, lol. So nothing inevitable about electricity becoming what it is today, lol.

And Constantine mostly adopted Christianity out of fear that cults like Mithraism was spreading among his troops and Mithraism was an offshoot of Zoroastrianism, which was the religion of Rome's rival empire, the Sassanids. And he had to rely on later emperors to continue imposing the religion (Theodosius made it the official state religion) and later emperors (Julian the Apostate) to fail in reverting the empire back to pagan religions. Just look at Akhenaton. He basically did what Constantine did but his was more radical and look at what happened to all of his efforts: Egypt reverted back to polytheism and tried to erase him from their history, lol. The same thing could have happened to Constantine. Constantine also had to rely on people like the Germanic tribes (especially the Franks) in adopting and spreading Christianity, too.

The Pax Mongolica is even more improbable than Christianity. What caused Genghis Khan to expand outside of Mongolia (the tribes he united)? Sure, he conquered that one territory because the governor killed his messengers. And the Pax Mongolica helped spread Christianity and provided one of the main incentives for why the New World was discovered because some Europeans wanted the spice trade and other trade with Asia back after the Ottomans sacked Constantinople, and they got the trade because of the safe passages that the Pax Mongolica provided, lol.

I have to go with Genghis Khan. It's not just about sperms and eggs. A whole lot of royal dynasties/nation states (Yuan in China, Timurids/Persian, Russia/Tartar, Ottomans) trace back to the Mongols. Mongols didn't start those empires/cultures but they sure had very lasting effect.

After that

Confucius - Confucianism is still arguably the dominant social philosophy in Asia
Augustus Caesar - Roman Empire might not have been an empire if not for his super human adm/mil/dip stats.
Hitler - arguably the defining villain of post-WWII history. So much of what we do today is basically: "What leads us farther away from Hitler?"
The guy that invented printing press

I think that you are thinking of Gutenberg or Bi Sheng, lol.

Confucius, himself, said that he was just continuing the values of the Western Zhou period, lol.
The main reason why Augustus and Antony were able to have their own armies was because of Gaius Marius' reform making it that the loyalty of the army is to its general instead of to the state.

What's up with the unnecessary "lol"s and smiley faces?

I just didn't want to spell the names.

Confucius, like pretty much all philosophers were continuing in some tradition they were educated in. But Confucius was significant because for various reasons, not the least of which was political exile, forced him to become essentially the teacher to the men in power at the time.

Augustus did a lot more than having a standing army. Dude had crazy Admin ability and almost single handedly created the institutions that became the foundation of the Roman empire for 200+ years.

Confucius didn't "become essentially the teacher to the men in power at the time," lol. He tried to ply his services to many provincial rulers and got rejected by them, except his home-state. The reason why Confucianism is so big is because Confucian scholars won the debate, narrowly beating out Huang-Lao, lol, so Wu Di adopted it as the state religion.

What I'm saying is that Augustus came to power because of the loyalty of his army is to him, lol. Or else, how can he contend for power without an army, lol? Same with Julius Caesar, lol. The Senate granted Pompey an army. If the army was loyal to the state, then Caesar wouldn't have been able to engage in a civil war with Pompey because the Senate gave Pompey the army therefore backing him, at the time. But I agree that his policies help create the Pax Romana.

The most important person in history is Carl Sagan, as once I was able to recruit him in my last game of Civ the mighty Roman Empire was able to launch it's space shuttle to Alpha Centauri sometime around T165, I mean 1560 AD.

itt nobody knows what influence means

The only influential person on your list is Confucius

Perhaps the functional definition of "most influential" used herein would help.

For example, you don't get on the list because you made an incremental contribution to humanity that anyone of your peers in your generation, or the following one could have made.

I think this eliminates almost all of the famous mathematicians, scientists and engineers. Possibly we can exempt Pasteur.

I also think we can eliminate the great generals. I'm not convinced that one gets the title of Most Influential for what is largely "running good".

Let's also eliminate all those who made one action or contribution, or a small number of actions/contributions that may have had gargantuan results. E.g. Gavrilo Princip.

I think we can promote some dark horses here for acts that are under appreciated...

King John signed the Magna Carta.

President Washington refused being made King and further gave up the presidency after only two terms.

Constantine saved Christianity.

Martin Luther displayed the ultimate Speak Truth to Power.

Plato not only is largely responsible for what we know of Socrates, but made his own contributions to humanity.