President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Instrumental in saving the planet by initiating the Green New Deal in 2019. (probably not actually implemented until 2021 because being blocked by the Republicans).
1st US female President, 1st Hispanic President, youngest US President.
Credited with saving US democracy after the disaster that was the Trump Presidency.
(I don’t actually believe this, more likely we’re just fucked and there won’t be anyone around in 200 years to compose this list)
Berners-Lee will make it, just Gutenberg did: the WWW was as true a revolution as printing. Watson? Maybe.
Hold your horses, she’ll be eligible in 2024.
:smack: the world is not really going to end in 12 years.
Hillary and Oprah are hardly huge names as great figures so unless this is an American only list they will scarcely figure on what they have done so far.
The difficulty with any such list is predicting what will be important in the future on what has been considered in the past (or even present).
Two centuries from now. I’d guess…
Bill and Melinda Gates
Paul Simon
Anthony Hopkins
Pope Francis (by definition)
and someone who’s still a kid now but has a great future ahead of them.
Linus Torvalds is the only one I’m positive about. Maybe Snowden.
Gonna bump this and say, with Donald Trump as President of the US & Boris Johnson the PM of the UK, a month before Brexit looks like Putin hasn’t lost his lead here.
While The Beatles might still be known as a group, I doubt anyone will remember th enames of the individual members.
People will still be reading Stephen King, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s show will still be produced, and maybe Bob Dylan’s poetry will still be read and/or sung.
I agree that Bill Gates and Vladimir Putin may be the two best living candidates for the future Most Influential List.
Let’s just hope that Putin’s influence does not continue to grow. :eek:
Some of the popular choices are vastly over-rated IMO. Linus Torvalds, for example. He was certainly a top programmer, but there were hundreds of programmers at least as good, beginning with Unix’ actual creators, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson. Torvalds’ special importance, IIUC, was that he was one of the few Unix gurus who hadn’t read Unix kernel source code! (Those who had read the source code would have been attacked by copyright lawyers if they coded a Unix look-alike.)
This decade has an unprecedented amount of its popular (digital) culture archived; whoever is still remembered will likely be an actor or singer, not something meatier like an inventor or head of state. The ones who will be remembered the way we remember Marilyn Monroe and James Dean (icons whose actual accomplishments are kind of slight) will include:
Sean Connerey
William Shatner
Benedict Cumberbatch
Madonna
Dolly Parton
Are Pele and Maradona still alive?
Given today’s events, gonna double my bet on this one.
I know I keep doing that, but my boy Putin just keeps cashing those checks, so might be bumping this one for a while. 
Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo from football (soccer). I don’t think there’s been a more dominant rivalry between two individuals rewriting the record books for so many years. Making other great players look ordinary in comparison. They also play the world’s most popular sport even if in America it’s not that big. They’ll be recognised everywhere they go. Elon Musk, not so much.
I haven’t read this entire thread, so not sure if this has been suggested. But if there’s some individual who winds up being credited with bringing us back from the brink of climate change disaster, then I would definitely see that person on the list 200 years from now. Greta Thunberg? Al Gore?