If you want to have a token minority on there why not have one who actually accomplished something like MLK?
Keep in mind that the premise in the OP is that the list is being compiled 200 years in the future and includes the 100 greatest people ever. Given that, do you think that Hilary Clinton, Oprah and Angela Merkel belong on that list?
The choice was supposed to be living today. That narrows the field considerably.
Merkel I would expect to be on that list.
As for Hilary, she was the first woman to have a genuine shot at the White House. If another woman actually becomes president during the next two hundred years, I imagine that woman would be on the list, and not Hilary.
As for Oprah, she is a genuine icon, who made her climb herself, unlike Hilary. 200 years from now? If such a list considers contributions to making mainstream America color-blind, yeah, I think she would be on the list.
I’m kind of assuming that merely being the first minority person (woman, black, gay, etc) to hold a prominent position wouldn’t cut it to get on the list - you could get on the list by visibly, actively instigating forward progress against prejudice (like MLK did), but merely existing as a minority and otherwise not making notable contributions I don’t think would make it.
(Of course I’m also kind of assuming we’ll have been replaced by our robot overlords by then, so feel free to take me with a grain of salt.)
George HW Bush died on Nov. 30, but let’s pretend he lived one more day…
What about Bush and Gorbachev together, for ending the Cold War and presiding over the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Empire? This was a major great-power conflict that really could have Ended Everything. If we’re still here in 200 years, I imagine that the climbdown from this potentially existential confrontation will still seem pretty important.
Like Howard Hughes, I think Musk will be remembered more for the scope of his dreams than his actual lasting legacy. He may be remembered more for his failures than his achievements - again similar to Hughes - but at least failing in extremely ambitious ways. “Obsessive pursuit of unobtainable goal” is always a story that people find compelling - it almost has a folk-hero quality to it.
I just thought of some… Doudna / Zhang /Charpentier / et al. for discovering CRISPR.
I suspect that one way or another, that’ll be seen as a monumental discovery in 200 years to come.
Unless I’m misinterpreting the question, the list itself includes people from throughout history, but we’re restricting ourselves to only naming people who are living today who would be on that all-time-greatest list (if any).
I notice that the OP has deliberately not defined “greatest.” It looks like many of us are interpreting “Greatest People” to mean “people who had the greatest impact on the world” or “people who accomplished the greatest things.” This is certainly a legitimate interpretation, but it’s not the only possible one.
I’ll suggest three Brits, two of whom I think are new to thIs thread:
Paul McCartney
He might have to share a space with John Lennon but for influence and output he’s unmatched. I’ve heard music historians comparing the musical output of Lennon and McCartney as being similar to greats like Mozart.
Tim-Berners Lee
He invented the World Wide Web and made sure it was free to use (I’m no expert of him so I’m guessing someone will be along shortly to tear this claim apart)
Queen Elizabeth II
The longest serving British monarch, she’s redefined what monarchy means. During her rein she’s overseen the modernisation of the British monarchy to the point of almost total overhaul. There was no model for her to copy but without it her monarchy and therefore the governments of the entire Commonwealth might have been totally different. Many other monarchies have been influenced by this example and of course she’s advised Prime Ministers for seven decades through many crisis.
#5 Muhammad Ali. Yeah sure, he’s not alive anymore, but so what? (Liston, Frazier, Foreman, etc. … sport’s GOAT and a funny guy to boot)
#4 Secretariat (not human and he’s not alive any more, but so what?? At the 1973 Belmont Stakes, that horse was super-human)
#3: Ludwig Van Beethoven. He’s not alive any more, but so what ?!? 9th Symphony : greatest human artistic achievement of all time)
#2: Issac Newton. He’s not alive any more, but so What?!?!? (pretty darned good with numbers and such)
#1: Norm McDonald. He’s still alive!!! funniest human ever).
Ah, what the heck - if we’re all going to vote for dead people I propose Isaac Asimov. Whether or not robots actually take over, I suspect that his three laws will still be employed in some fashion and become universally known as important.
Y’all nominate who you like… it’s your thread now. 
It’s fun to guess who are the living people who will have the greatest influence on the future, but I think some overlook just how hugely great someone must be to make a Top 100 All-Time List. I think Bill Gates is the most plausible name offered so far.
Hart’s list ranks by “Influence” not “Greatness” and cannot be considered The One True List anyway, but it is a reasonable ranking and serves as an indication of how selective a Top 100 must be. Charlemagne, at #98, barely makes Hart’s List! MIT’s Pantheon List is also reasonable; and for fun I compared the two lists. To demonstrate how selective a Top 100 List must be, here are just twenty of the (about 58) names on Pantheon’s List missing from Hart’s List:
[ul][li] Leonardo da Vinci[/li][li] Archimedes[/li][li] Mozart[/li][li] Herodotus[/li][li] Marco Polo[/li][li] Immanuel Kant[/li][li] Attila the Hun[/li][li] Ferdinand Magellan[/li][li] Winston Churchill[/li][li] Hippocrates of Cos[/li][li] Socrates[/li][li] Pythagoras[/li][li] King David of Judah and Israel[/li][li] Joan of Arc[/li][li] Von Goethe[/li][li] St. Peter[/li][li] Dante Alighieri[/li][li] Saladin the Great of Egypt[/li][li] Hannibal Barca[/li][li] Mahatma Gandhi[/li][/ul]
I think many Dopers will find it absurd that names like Leonardo, Mozart, Hippocrates are missing from a Top 100 list.
Here’s the vice versa: Twenty names on Hart’s List missing from Pantheon’s:
[ul][li] Louis Pasteur[/li][li] Copernicus[/li][li] Constantine the Great[/li][li] James Watt[/li][li] Michael Faraday [/li][li] James Clerk Maxwell [/li][li] George Washington[/li][li] Wright Brothers[/li][li] Thomas Alva Edison[/li][li] Thomas Jefferson[/li][li] William the Conqueror[/li][li] Cyrus the Great[/li][li] Mao Tse-Tung[/li][li] Henry Ford[/li][li] Simon Bolivar [/li][li] Hernando Cortes[/li][li] Leonhard Euler[/li][li] Johannes Kepler[/li][li] Antoine Lavoisier[/li][li] Queen Isabella of Castile[/li][/ul]
… And I think scientific Dopers will find Euler, Pasteur, Faraday, Maxwell, and/or Kepler to be must-includes.
Abraham Lincoln, Rockefeller, Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, the Rothschilds, Emperor Charles V, Benjamin Franklin, Otto von Bismarck, Hammurabi of Babylon and Niels Bohr are not included on either List.
TL;DR: One hundred is a small number. It is very hard to qualify for an All-Time Greatest 100 Persons List.
(I hope I’ll be forgiven for posting these silly lists. At least, I’ll be able to find them, which would be far from certain if I left them in my cluttered folders.) Searching for more lists ranking the Most Influential Humans Ever, I came to Listographic.Com. It is very obviously based on Michael Hart’s List, with mostly the same names in much the same order. But it has 120 names instead of 100. I’ll report on the additions.
The Listographic list (Ali Raza Attar’s List) has two living humans and one recently deceased: Vladimir Putin, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.
I’m very afraid Ali has it right; Gates and Putin are the living humans most likely to make it into a future All-time Most Influential List. :o
Putin is likely to go down in history as far more important than others of today’s leaders.
(To reduce boring clutter I’ll detail other names on Ali’s list in a spoiler box.)
Ali removes five names from Hart’s list:
- John F. Kennedy
- Gregory Pincus
- Justinian the Great
- Mani the Prophet
- Mahavira Jina, founder of Jainism
(Removing JFK, one of only two Presidents on Hart’s list) will be a popular decision I think. But Hart explains JFK’s inclusion with a convincing case that the Moon wouldn’t have been visited without JFK’s push for it.)
Ali includes seven names from The Pantheon list missing from Hart’s: Che Guevara along with six I mentioned in my last post (Leonardo da Vinci, Archimedes, Joan of Arc, Hippocrates of Cos, Mahatma Gandhi, Attila the Hun). He also includes
- Abraham Lincoln
- Nikola Tesla
- Marie Curie
- Charles Babbage
- St. Thomas Aquinas
- Nelson Mandela
- Tamerlane
And here are eight more names to round out Ali’s List of 120: (It was these names which led me to click and see that Listographic is Ali Raza Attar’s site.)
- Abu Bakr, 1st Rightly Guided Caliph of Islam
- Ali ibn Abu Talib, 4th Caliph
- Husein the Martyr, son of Ali ibn Abu Talib
- Akbar Emperor of India
- Babur Emperor of India
- Guru Nanak, founder of Sikhism
- Muhammad Ali Jinnah, founder of Pakistan
- Krishna, God of Love
Of course, if the predominant power in 2219 is Chinese, Indian, or other, many of the people on Hart’s list will disappear as they are determined to be of more importance to European civilization than world civilization.
[ul]
[li]Paul McCartney[/li][li]Larry Page and Sergey Brin of google/alphabet (re: self-driving car, AI, machine singularity and subsequent eradication of space inefficient meatbags.)[/li][li]Roomba[/li][/ul]
Siri, #6
I think we have to give serious consideration to Malala Yousafzai
She strikes me as an all-round impressive person. Smart, brave, humane and outspoken. The lot of the islamic woman in politics is not a easy one and she already has had to bear much on her young shoulders but, given a fair wind and the ability to avoid the real and metaphorical bullets that will come her way we may have a serious leader in the making.
This.
The USA as we know it is only 242 years old right now, with a population of ~325 million. A mere blip on the global scale of governments and population. Everyone and everything that ever happened in the past 242 years could be wiped from the history books and peoples memories in the 4+ generations to come in the next 200 years.
This.
The U.S.A as we know it is only 242 years old right now, with a population of ~325 million. A mere blip on the global scale of governments and population. Everyone and everything that ever happened in the past 242 years could be wiped from the history books and peoples memories in the 4+ generations to come in the next 200 years.
Edit: The thread about the Top 100 Billboard rankings in the past 60 years is a good example of how history is continually revised. https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=869117. How many songs/artists do you know?