-Sir Alexander Fleming (guy who discovered the anti-biotic properties of penicillin)
-Sir Isaac Newton or alternatively, Gottfried Leibniz (they both independently of one another invented Calculus roughly around the same time)
-Bill Watterson
Bill Watterson is up there
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His brother started it.
His hands are typically displayed stretched out to the sides, not down.
An apocalyptic rabbi who’s had unfathomable violence done in his name? Yeah hey, thanks for the ‘be nice to each other’ rhetoric, but half the people spreading that message brought not peace but a sword.
And as a queer American I can attest his fanboys aren’t exactly polite on their own turf.
Not even the most popular prophet from an Abrahamic religion. Second rate at best and losing to a war mongering pedophile at that.
The person who figured out how to make fire
I believe many great human beings have existed throughout history, but the impact they cause is often limited by their circumstances. For example, there have been thinkers defending compassion towards human beings and animals in possibly every culture, but those sages live and die admired yet misunderstood. Their lives are seen as “extraordinary”, and thus, not attainable for normal people like us. We give up on following them since the start, instead of trying to achieve their wisdom or understanding…
Anyway, by mere impact, I guess Socrates, Plato, and Immanuel Kant are on the top for me. The first ones were influential in the development of many branches of knowledge, and solidified a tradition of critical thinking since antiquity. Immanuel Kant is kind of recent, but I’d say his works were really important for discussions around philosophy, science, arts, religion, and more. I admire Immanuel Kant greatly. I was recently reading a little text he wrote about psychiatric disorders and he was predicting modern paradigms in the 18th century. He was such a brilliant and knowledgeable person.
There are also incredible inventions and discoveries that have helped us all, but often those are the results of collective efforts. Still, as I said before, amazing human beings the ones that gave and still give these things for free. Getting personal again, I wouldn’t be alive without many of those advances (vaccines, medications, etc.). On the technological side, the founder of that website that unlocks academic papers has had an impact that is yet to be analyzed.
Sorry! So many people…!
Did you know that Kant used to criticize people who drank more than one cup of coffee per day. Also, he would refill his own coffee cup before it was empty, so he never had more than one cup.
That’s hilarious! I guess he was a normal man with normal blunders in his daily life. I’ve heard about his meticulousness, that we had strict rules for his routines and reunions, but never details (and never the cup of coffee thing). Thanks for sharing.
I intended to write that just as an intro paragraph to a critique of enlightenment philosophy, since I feel like, while the goal of objectifying the human experience was the natural predecessor to the eventual subjectification of the exterior universe, their confidence in their interpretations of their experience – or maybe just in the universality of their interpretations – makes their entire project a bit sus
But then life happened and I just said the thing about coffee.
Norman borlaug and Fritz Haber. The first was basically the father of modern agriculture helping feed over a billion people. The latter known as the man that saved billions and killed millions, helped develop the haber bosch process that produces ammonia used in fertillizers that are responsible for feeding half the world’s population. It was also used in explosives hence the “killed millions” part.
Is that the guy that discovered the gas used in the Holocaust?
Cyclon b was used as a fumigant before it was used in the holocaust. It was also called Prussic acid and would be known as Hydrogen Cyanide today. It was discovered by Carl Scheele back in the 1700s. It is also what gives poisonous (bitter) almonds their characteristic scent and toxicity.
Haber did however, suggest the use of Chlorine gas as a chemical weapon which his wife was so horrified by that she committed suicide. Haber was also partially responsible for the development of the Born Haber cycle which is a theoretical tool used to estimate the thermodynamic stability of salts.
Haber is only listed here because ultimately billions would have starved to death without the Haber process. And regardless of his intentions and the other things he did, that particular invention arguably saved more lives than anyone else that has ever lived.
Even the fertilizer thing is arguably bad. It’s allowed the population of the world to explode at an exponential rate and burn through resources even faster rather than be capped at a much more manageable level.
The alternative wasn’t a reasonable population, it was billions starving. The solution was, and still is, giving women better control over whether or not they have children.
Even more are going to starve when we run out of fossil fuels and can no longer sustain the agriculture required to feed the now massively inflated population. Not to mention all the other damage having so many more people is doing to the world that is also probably going to kill us even if we solve the resource problem.
Thank you for providing context. I did not mean to blame (or make people think that) Haber for any deaths, he was a smart person that made a great impact on all of us. It isn’t his fault people think of other ways to use his work for death. It most have been hard on him to have his wife commit suicide over it though. That’s rough.
Haber did not develop the Haber process to produce fertillizer. He did it precisely because German access to saltpeter from South America had been cut off and that threatened to severely compromise the German capacity for war. This was not a case where Haber’s work was meant for benign peaceful purposes and misappropriated for use in war. It was used exactly the way he intended it to be. It just happened to also be useful for keeping half the planet from starving to death. His wife did not kill herself because his work was misused. She killed herself because it was used exactly how Haber wanted it to be. And he can’t advocate for the use of Chlorine as a chemical weapon and have clean hands by definition.
Which is why I said that the only reason he was mentioned is because the Haber process ultimately saved the lives of billions of people arguably outweighing the harm that process was developed to enable. Haber wasn’t a good guy by any stretch of the imagination but without the Haber process, we would have had famine and death on a scale never seen in all of human history on this planet.
Interesting. Thanks for the explanation. I guess I got mixed up with the process name and his actual intended use.
my mother
I’m glad you were born, my dear. You are such a blessing!
Joseph Stalin
Didn’t go far enough in denazifying the world, a consequence we now have to deal with today.
Stalin was not perfect; for instance, he stopped at Berlin. But he also defeated Hitler and built the Soviet Union into an industrial superpower.
I dont think the millions he was responsible for their deaths would agree.
You’re right, the millions of Nazis and Trotskyites killed by Stalin probably would not agree that he had a positive impact on humanity. Thankfully I am neither a Nazi nor a Trotskyite. Which are you?
Right, let’s ignore all of the people forced to relocate their homes
You could have named a couple of different WW2 leaders that helped defeat the Nazi, why chose the person that is arguably as bad as hilter?
Stalin is definitely not “Arguably as bad as Hitler”. The only major WWII leaders who were actually “Arguably as bad as Hitler” were Mussolini, Hirohito, Churchill, and Truman.
Let me guess… you are semi-communist so you like him but dont like the rest?
Just a heads up, conflating the guy who did the holocaust and the guy who ended it is literally antisemitism. That’s where like 90% of the hate for communism comes from, btw. That and ass-blasted slavers who now have to pay their employees humane wages because of unions.
This one guy posted a really good resource that explains this in more detail if you want to know more, I sadly don’t have the link myself.
How many people did Stalin kill via policy or directly?
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A fuck ton of nazis, but not enough.
You guys are aweful blood thirsty… I was actually referring to how many of his own people he killed.
The Mitochondrial Eve.
Yeah my answer was “our Most Recent Common Ancestor”
Jesus, Mahatma Gandhi, and The Buddha all had profound impacts on the way that humans relate to each other, and the world around them. Each promoted non-violence and/or pacifism in a world ruled by ruthlessness and cruelty. I don’t think we would be anywhere close to where we are now with human rights without their contributions to human understanding of empathy.
One of these is not like the others. Gandhi is polarising at best in India, and just kind of a nice brown guy strawman in the West.
Why is he polarizing in India?
As I understand it: Too tolerant and Westernised for Hindutva people, too mystical and obscure for progressives. When they made the biggest statue in the world, it was chosen to be of his colleague Vallabhbhai Patel.
As for why he’s not the cartoonified nice guy he’s often made out to be, well, I could talk about a number of issues, but this quote on how far he would take pacifism is pretty shocking:
Hitler killed five million [sic] Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs…It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany… As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions.
I figured that was the answer. Thanks for sharing. As for the quote on the Holocaust, that’s rough man. I guess I see his perspective, since what he did worked for him and India, but it sounds so ridiculous and callous to those of us who do not share the perspective.
I have never been a pacifist, but I understand its value and respect those with the strength to utilize it. It does take strength too. I can’t imagine enduring what pacifists have endured throughout history. Even here in the United States, I love MLKJ’s message, but I identify with Malcom X’s perspective more personally.
Zorbulon, and you’ve likely never known it.
Taylor Swift ❤️
Is this supposed to be ironic? Is this meant to instigate a discussion on her impact on pollution as an individual vs the value of her pop entertainment production?
No one changes me more than my girlfriend Taylor Swift 💖💖💖
James Color and Samantha Colour respectively, they invented color in their respective regions, before then the world was in black and white. Similar to Sandy Loam, very little is known about their personal life, or even what they look like. Hell, even their first names are up in the air.
It’s really tragic that we don’t celebrate the history of the people of Color the way we could.
Newton
Karl Marx
Politicians and kings rarely do something they weren’t forced to, and inventors are rarely without competition, so I take issue with most of the responses here.
Instead, I’ll go with naval officer Vasily Arkhipov, who, if he had decided to agree with the normal officers of the submarine he happened to be on, would have started a hot Cold War on 27 October, 1962.
Then again, there was a separate, slightly less severe close call the same day, so if you butterfly that who knows what else happens. It was a crazy time where few understood nuclear diplomacy and cold warfare, but nukes were ubiquitous, and were being treated like normal weapons. We got lucky.
There was another noteworthy case with Stanislav Petrov.
Yup. That one had a bit more wiggle room, though, because his superiors might have just come to the same conclusion he did. The other incident marked likely on the Wikipedia list is actually from France, which is almost funny to me. Can you imagine France doing a first strike out of nowhere?
