# The most significant person in the history of the whole world **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [December 6, 2010, 12:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-significant-person-in-the-history-of-the-whole-world/563087 "2010-12-06T00:57:25Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![The\_Flying\_Dutchman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/9fc348/32.png) [@The\_Flying\_Dutchman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Flying_Dutchman)\ **Post date:** [December 6, 2010, 8:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-significant-person-in-the-history-of-the-whole-world/563087/41 "2010-12-06T20:59:16Z")
> [@Blaster\_Master](#): > > I came in to say Moses, Abraham perhaps envelopes a little more (like Kaballah, however it’s spelled), but Moses did a lot more to define Judaism (and thus Christianity and Islam), so I’d say a stronger influence over almost as much is more significant. Moses is what I had in mind. He’s the guy who purportedly wrote the history and original laws that defined the Israelites/Jews, the most cohesive ethnic group that has maintained their identity for three millenia. And that resulted in modern judaism, christianity and islam affecting the vast majority of the world. Had Moses or whoever ,singular or plural, attempted to script what it meant to be an Israelite never drew the pen or hammered the chisel,our modern world would appear drammatically different. Just how would be open for debate. ---
**Author:** ![TruCelt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/trucelt/32/523_2.png) [@TruCelt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TruCelt)\ **Post date:** [December 6, 2010, 9:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-significant-person-in-the-history-of-the-whole-world/563087/42 "2010-12-06T21:04:28Z")
> [@The\_Flying\_Dutchman](#): > > I think you do a disservice to the vast majority of mankind that do not look to St Paul for answers to the “truth”. I disagree. Very few of them have escaped the influence of the Catholic religion and/or the subsequent “Christian” ones. I never said they didn’t have their own religions, or that those weren’t important, but “Most Influential” is the discussion here. At one point or another, ans in very large ways, they have all been forced to respond to the impetus of the religion founded by St. Paul. If we are accepting prehistoric unknowns, then I vote for the first proto-European who had the idea to promote a “God” or system of “Gods” and set him/her self up as its spokesman. I guess the inventor of “Priesthood” is what I’m getting at. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Flying\_Dutchman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/9fc348/32.png) [@The\_Flying\_Dutchman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Flying_Dutchman)\ **Post date:** [December 6, 2010, 9:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-significant-person-in-the-history-of-the-whole-world/563087/43 "2010-12-06T21:07:26Z")
> [@Toxylon](#): > > Nah. It’s the person who first made fire, as opposed to lending it from natural sources. We wouldn’t have ceramics, metals, glass, plastics, motors etc.etc. without ready-at-hand fire. Agriculture would’ve never gotten anywhere without it. Most of the world outside the tropics would’ve never been inhabited. Hell, there’d be no Homo sapiens. > > The thing is, it really took a world-class genius with unbelievable tenacity to pull it off. It’s not that hard to make two sticks hot, or even smoke, by rubbing them together hard. But the leap from smoky sticks to a glowing ember is a huge one, as anyone who’s done it knows. Many, many things have to be just so. Without prior knowledge, there were no guarantees that all the hard work would pay off, except maybe for a genius. I’m certain making fire from scratch happened very few times in all of history, but once someone pulled it off, it spread like wildfire (heh). The single most useful piece of tech a human can have. It has been pretty well accepted tha homos could light fires before sapiens sapiens arived on the scene. No big deal. ---
**Author:** ![This\_Just\_In\_2](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bbe5ce/32.png) [@This\_Just\_In\_2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/This_Just_In_2)\ **Post date:** [December 6, 2010, 9:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-significant-person-in-the-history-of-the-whole-world/563087/44 "2010-12-06T21:33:15Z")
I own a copy of “[The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_100)” - and it makes a pretty compelling argument for those on the list as being the most influential. Not sure if this is the same as the OP’s ‘significant’, but I think it might be. The people on the list are chosen simply because the things they are reported to have done have influenced the largest number of people worldwide. Hence, Muhammad ranks higher than JC because there have historically been more Muslims - or people affected by Muslims. Cai Lun is ranked high because of the impact of his invention on the world. Doesn’t mean someone else would not have created paper - but he did it first. Equally important, the length of time the invention has been around and the number of users of it through the ages increase its weighted importance. Peoples whose origins/name/info are completely unknown, such as the inventor of fire/wheel/etc, are left off the list. Seems reasonable since it would just be speculation on whether it was a group of people or whatever that caused that persons significance. 1 Muhammad 2 Isaac Newton 3 Jesus Christ 4 Gautama Buddha 5 Confucius 6 St. Paul 7 Cai Lun 8 Johannes Gutenberg 9 Christopher Columbus 10 Albert Einstein If you’re seriously interested in the most significant/influential people, look this book up. The author makes a decent case for everyone on the list - plus a 3 or 4 page bio on a lot of these guys was pretty educational to me. ---
**Author:** ![Boyo\_Jim](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/87869e/32.png) [@Boyo\_Jim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Boyo_Jim)\ **Post date:** [December 6, 2010, 9:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-significant-person-in-the-history-of-the-whole-world/563087/45 "2010-12-06T21:39:13Z")
> [@The\_Flying\_Dutchman](#): > > All these inventions were waiting to be invented. > > The bronze age is over. we don’t need it any more. > > The steam engine is over too. > > The wheel is still big but marine transport is much bigger and the travois is much more versatile and useful for much of human history. Wasn"t _every_ invention “waiting” to be invented"? I chose the inventor of bronze because, AFAIK, it was the first metal to be purified and shaped for human use. I see it as the basis of virtually every created material since. The wheel is the basis of virtually every machine in history. Show me a boat with a motor that doesn’t have a wheel in it. The steam engine represents the creation of power greater than what can be developed by human or animal muscle power. One might argue that the same is true of windmills and water wheels, but a steam engine can be put almost anywhere and run 24/7 so long as it can be supplied with fuel. It is the basis of the industrial revolution. And me, well, I figured all this shit out. ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [December 6, 2010, 9:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-significant-person-in-the-history-of-the-whole-world/563087/46 "2010-12-06T21:41:12Z")
> [@TruCelt](#): > > I disagree. Very few of them have escaped the influence of the Catholic religion and/or the subsequent “Christian” ones. I never said they didn’t have their own religions, or that those weren’t important, but “Most Influential” is the discussion here. At one point or another, ans in very large ways, they have all been forced to respond to the impetus of the religion founded by St. Paul. > > If we are accepting prehistoric unknowns, then I vote for the first proto-European who had the idea to promote a “God” or system of “Gods” and set him/her self up as its spokesman. I guess the inventor of “Priesthood” is what I’m getting at. But there wasn’t any one guy who invented “priesthood”, or the concept of “gods”. This is an idea that was multiply invented by lots of different people on different continents. The Aztec priests who cut out thousands of hearts on top of pyramids of skulls didn’t learn the idea from some proto-Sumerian scribe. Every hunter-gatherer society has some notion of the supernatural, which in my opinion is a natural superstition caused by mistakenly attributing human emotions to nonhuman entities. We humans have a gigantic purpose-built set of mental facilities that enable us to decode and interpret the behavior of other human beings, and it seems like a pretty much inevitable mistake for those facilities to be used to interpret natural phenomenon. And so humans invent spirits and monsters, and when floods or lightning or bad hunting happens, they believe that some entity with human-like emotions must be responsible, and since humans can be influenced in various ways, they attempt to influence these mysterious entities in the same way they’d try to mollify an annoyed neighbor. And as societies get more complex, their ideas about these entities get more complex. So tribal people imagine the spirits living a tribal lifestyle, people living in the early kingdoms imagined the spirits (that is, gods) living like the early nobility. And so a thunder spirit is imagined to be a king. And the shamans who specialized in interacting with the supernatural become priests. Just like the invention of agriculture, religion organically grew out of the human experience. It wasn’t like “The Invention of Lying” where the prehistoric equivalent of Ricky Gervais made up the idea of God and everyone just believed him. And as for the inventors of particular technologies, I’m more of the opinion that technology tends to be multiply invented, and if you look into the canonical inventors of particular technologies you’ll usually find that they didn’t actually invent the gadget they’re credited with, but rather built the first well known and smoothly working version of the gadget. The history of the [invention of the sewing machine](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sewing_machine#History_and_development) is a great example, because it’s development and the legal wrangling over it are so well documented. You sometimes see one person come up with something revolutionary, but much more often it’s a race between people to see who can figure something out first–Watson and Crick getting credit for discovering the structure of DNA is a great example. Smother Watson and Crick in their cribs and the Nobel Prize for the structure of DNA would have been awarded to someone else within a year or two. ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [December 7, 2010, 2:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-significant-person-in-the-history-of-the-whole-world/563087/47 "2010-12-07T14:58:57Z")
> [@TruCelt](#): > > “history of the whole world” folks. History. That means written down. That’s only one meaning of the word “history,” and it’s not the relevant one. Please double-check your dictionary before offering a definitional correction. ---
**Author:** ![Grey](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/b782af/32.png) [@Grey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grey)\ **Post date:** [December 7, 2010, 3:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-significant-person-in-the-history-of-the-whole-world/563087/48 "2010-12-07T15:22:04Z")
Poor old James Maxwell. Guy goes and unifies electricity and magnetism which ultimately overthrows Newtonian physics then helps lay the foundation for statistical thermodynamics and he gets left out while the twitchy alchemist and bad hair day violinist get all the glory. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Todderbob](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/e47774/32.png) [@Todderbob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Todderbob)\ **Post date:** [December 7, 2010, 3:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-significant-person-in-the-history-of-the-whole-world/563087/49 "2010-12-07T15:53:50Z")
> [@The\_Flying\_Dutchman](#): > > Simply, you’ll have to do better than that. Why? ---
**Author:** ![StusBlues](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/dc4da7/32.png) [@StusBlues](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/StusBlues)\ **Post date:** [December 7, 2010, 4:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-significant-person-in-the-history-of-the-whole-world/563087/50 "2010-12-07T16:10:16Z")
Marty Robbins, for the win. My post is my cite. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Flying\_Dutchman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/9fc348/32.png) [@The\_Flying\_Dutchman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Flying_Dutchman)\ **Post date:** [December 7, 2010, 4:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-significant-person-in-the-history-of-the-whole-world/563087/51 "2010-12-07T16:50:39Z")
> [@Todderbob](#): > > On the other hand, the further back you go the more influential specific acts are. I’d nominate the Spartan King Leonidas and Athenean General Themistocles, jointly (or whatever unnamed individual helped them work together). Their stand against the Persians both paved the way for the unification of Greece (which of course led to Rome, and western civilization as we know it),and greatly influenced Persias relationship with the west for well over century to come – which greatly influenced it’s relationship with the East. That stand had a massive cascading effect. > [@The\_Flying\_Dutchman](#): > > Simply, you’ll have to do better than that. > [@Todderbob](#): > > Why? You claim their legacy starts with some influence on the unification of Greece. Tell that to Phillip and Alexander the Great. Or the Spartans who never submitted to either. ---
**Author:** ![Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e8c25b/32.png) [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)\ **Post date:** [December 7, 2010, 5:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-significant-person-in-the-history-of-the-whole-world/563087/52 "2010-12-07T17:54:19Z")
I wonder how many people will vote for Tim Berners-Lee is we have this thread again in 50 years. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Flying\_Dutchman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/9fc348/32.png) [@The\_Flying\_Dutchman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Flying_Dutchman)\ **Post date:** [December 7, 2010, 6:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-significant-person-in-the-history-of-the-whole-world/563087/53 "2010-12-07T18:04:33Z")
> [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](#): > > I wonder how many people will vote for Tim Berners-Lee is we have this thread again in 50 years. What, for those back slashes ? ---
**Author:** ![Todderbob](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/e47774/32.png) [@Todderbob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Todderbob)\ **Post date:** [December 7, 2010, 6:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-significant-person-in-the-history-of-the-whole-world/563087/54 "2010-12-07T18:16:21Z")
> [@The\_Flying\_Dutchman](#): > > You claim their legacy starts with some influence on the unification of Greece. Tell that to Phillip and Alexander the Great. Or the Spartans who never submitted to either. Phillip and Alexander, the entire hellenistic period, owes it’s existence to that battle. ---
**Author:** ![Sailboat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sailboat/32/461_2.png) [@Sailboat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sailboat)\ **Post date:** [December 7, 2010, 7:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-significant-person-in-the-history-of-the-whole-world/563087/55 "2010-12-07T19:52:18Z")
> [@Lemur866](#): > > Agriculture is a practice that has been invented and reinvented thousands of times over the millennia, and is certainly not the creation of a single genius or a couple of geniuses. I think this is an exaggeration. Agriculture has definitely been developed multiple times by multiple societies, but as Diamond points out in _Guns, Germs, and Steel_, there are a few clearly-defined centers of origin. Agriculture spread very rapidly from those centers, being carried by farming cultures or being adopted readily by their neighbors. The spread was so rapid that it probably precluded lots of separate opportunities for independent discovery. ---
**Author:** ![Malacandra](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Malacandra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malacandra)\ **Post date:** [December 7, 2010, 10:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-significant-person-in-the-history-of-the-whole-world/563087/56 "2010-12-07T22:34:29Z")
> [@The\_Flying\_Dutchman](#): > > It has been pretty well accepted tha homos could light fires before sapiens sapiens arived on the scene. No big deal. What with flaming and all. ---
**Author:** ![JohnT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnt/32/15048_2.png) [@JohnT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnT)\ **Post date:** [December 7, 2010, 10:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-significant-person-in-the-history-of-the-whole-world/563087/57 "2010-12-07T22:42:43Z")
> [@Mahaloth](#): > > Didn’t we have a game for this in the Game Room? > > Anyway, I’d say Jesus Christ, easily. [Yes](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=559639). And the good people who participated selected **Isaac Newton** as the most important named person in human history. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [December 7, 2010, 10:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-significant-person-in-the-history-of-the-whole-world/563087/58 "2010-12-07T22:53:56Z")
Harmon Killebrew ---
**Author:** ![The\_Flying\_Dutchman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/9fc348/32.png) [@The\_Flying\_Dutchman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Flying_Dutchman)\ **Post date:** [December 7, 2010, 11:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-significant-person-in-the-history-of-the-whole-world/563087/59 "2010-12-07T23:00:36Z")
> [@Malacandra](#): > > What with flaming and all. I just have to acknowledge a good come back. ---
**Author:** ![JohnT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnt/32/15048_2.png) [@JohnT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnT)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2010, 12:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-significant-person-in-the-history-of-the-whole-world/563087/60 "2010-12-08T00:30:37Z")
I would say that if we have to answer with a name (because the true inventors of human civilizations - those responsible for fire/mining/agriculture/writing/speech/etc - have no names) than I would go with: **Socrates** Or Plato or Aristotle, but Socrates was first so, imho, that gives him the lead. Jesus or Paul or Moses? Not even close. The thing that makes Western Civilization so different from other cultures is our rational, questioning approach to everything, this approach first given to the world by Socrates. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-significant-person-in-the-history-of-the-whole-world/563087.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-significant-person-in-the-history-of-the-whole-world/563087.md?page=4)