But, some discoveries were transitional. One could argue that Pierce, Turing and Boysel were just technical stepping stones. Leonardo Filius Bonacci, however, championed the use of Arab numerical notation in Europe. His Liber Abaci became the basic text that lead to the discoveries of Galileo and Newton.
The question here is who had the greatest impact on modern society.
The goodness of Jesus is not at the forefront of our modern society (we are offered a corporate raider as being Christian).
The computation technology pioneered by Bonacci is everywhere - car, TV, phone, desk, job, home…I’d count (pun) that as ‘impact on modern society’.
As soon as you grant the existence of any single person who significantly changed the world, you’re forced to the conclusion that the most significant person ever was the earliest, no matter what that person did. For instance, let’s say for the sake of argument that Jesus changed the world. But then, so did Mary, because if Mary hadn’t existed, then neither would Jesus have. So Mary must be at least as significant as Jesus was. But then, we can say the same about Anne and Joachim, or about their parents, and so on back through the generations. You don’t have to go back very far at all before you get to the point where everyone who left any descendants at all, has everyone in the world as a descendant, or even everyone in the historical record as a descendant, so anyone from that time could be said to be at least as significant as anyone in all of history.
Right. If Newton is measured as “most significant” in the sense that if he hadn’t been born we’d have the most different world, then either of Newton’s parents has to be more significant than Newton, because without them there would be no Newton. And his grandparents would be more significant than his parents, and so on and so on.
In that sense, the most significant person who ever lived was the unknown tribal leader 72,000 years ago after the Toba eruption, who possibly singlehandedly kept Homo Sapiens from going extinct.
I’ going to say Christopher Columbus. If he hadn’t existed we might not have a division between east and west. Another country other than Spain might have colonized the Americas. It’s possible the Native Americans might have met explorers from Europe, Asia, or Africa on more equal footing. Or they may have been even more technologically overwhelmed than they already were. I think that Had Columbus not existed, the world probably would be significantly different.
I agree that technology would have progressed without Columbus. I meant more in the geopolitical sense that the world would probably be significantly different. For example, it might have been someone working for the English or the French discovering the Americas under much different circumstances. It could be that English would predominate in the entire western hemisphere. Maybe the entirety of the Americas would be one country. Or maybe the USA amd Canada would be a hodge podge of third world countries instead of the current situation, with a more prosperous South America. All sorts of alternate scenarios are possible.
True, it may have been a bit different, but it would not have altered the overall economic forces that drove exploration. It was Spain that had just defeated the last enclave of Moors and was ready for expansion. The Basque fishermen had knowledge of the Atlantic. Columbus was an Italian adventurer, financed by Spain.
The British and French were about a hundred years behind the Spanish and Dutch.
Columbus had an impact, but it was diminished by subsequent events.
Yes, but inventions, explorations, and technology is, apparently, irrelevant to the discussion under the idea that “it would’ve happened anyway, by somebody else.”
Which I don’t buy as an argument against any individual being influential in this history, but there you go.
I think it’s a reasonable argument. Go back in a time machine and kill Augustus or Alexander as a baby, and what does modern society look like? What are the ripple effects?
Compare that to going back and killing Newton… in which case it’s very likely that the only real effect is that his discoveries are made 10 or 20 years later by a different person. Granted, that 10 or 20 year delay might have some extraordinarily huge butterfly effect that we can’t possibly even imagine, but it also might not, whereas killing one of the great leader/conquerors is almost certain to have a huge effect because it’s far less likely that someone 10 or 20 years later was going to do the same thing.
Of course if you use “go back in a time machine and kill them” as your only metric, you’re inevitably led to kill-their-parents-instead conclusion, so I don’t think that’s the ONLY metric… I think it should be something like “semi-predictable outcome based as-close-to-directly-as-possible on this person’s known actions, and how different world history would be if that outcome differed”.
The invention of the long-range oceanic sailing ship meant that in the latter 15th century Europeans were going to predominate the exploration of the oceans. The Arabs were pretty much limited to the Indian ocean and the coastal areas of eastern Asia, and China had gone into an insular period.
Meanwhile the Portuguese were expanding past the horn of Africa and earlier had pushed as far west as the Azores. Already the expedition of Fernão Dulmo and João Estreito had set sail west in 1487 looking for the “island of Antillia”, but evidently had worse luck with the weather than Columbus did. So it’s pretty much a given that some Portuguese or Spanish expedition would have reached the western hemisphere about that time.
Whether Columbus himself made such a difference that history would have taken a different path if instead some Portuguese captain we never heard of had found the Carribean in 1511, I don’t know. Spain was the power in western Europe at the time, and would inevitably have been a major player. There might have been differences but at this point it becomes a debate about butterflies flapping their wings.
Yes, but again, the question isn’t “whose influence is most easily replicated had they not existed?” but “who is the most influential?” Saying that others could have done X is irrelevant to the discussion because others didn’t do X. After all, we live in this world, not one in which Isaac Newton was killed as a teenager.
Sure, but isn’t “how influential was X” basically the same as saying “how different would things be if not for X”? If the only difference between this world and world in which Newton never lived was that we’d learn a different name in history-of-science class, and the fig cookies had a different name, it’s hard to really call Newton influential (not that I think for even a second that that’s the case).
Perhaps that’s correct - societies evolve to a point where discoveries become obvious. Newton/Leibniz, Darwin/Wallace…so the loss of an individual may not have changed much.
I believe it is the uniqueness and staying power of the discovery that counts. Printing and Mathematics are two of the most powerful influences on the modern world. Gutenberg and Filius Bonacci at least advanced us on the technology curve.
But you cannot make that argument - it’s just fiction to assume that things would be largely the same if Newton/Gutenberg/Einstein hadn’t existed. I can easily make the argument that had Augustus not lived, Roman history would’ve evolved mostly the same way because Augustus was just part of a larger historical impulse towards Roman dominance. And who can argue differently with any greater authority?
Well, it is sort of the unwritten rules of engaging in a counterfactual. Once you start asking “what if” questions you need to keep the variables as narrow as possible.
As Chronos mentioned earlier is Jesus more important than Mary? Without Mary there is no Jesus. We can run that thread to its conclusion that the first amoeba (or whatever the first life was) is responsible for everything.
Now, it has been mentioned several times on this board before that had Einstein not existed the time was ripe for someone to come along and figure out Relativity anyway. Maybe not in one go like Einstein did but we would have gotten there.
I asked, long ago here, how long slavery would have existed in the US had the Civil War not happened. We usually say Lincoln ended it but without Lincoln and the Civil War it still would likely have ended not long after anyway (a few decades maybe). Its time was passing.
It may well be that had Augustus not lived things would be largely the same…or they would be very different. That is the fun of that debate.
For a great read on these sorts of debates check out What If? That book is lots of fun and explores exactly these sorts of questions.
