I guess that would be Prometheus since he gave us fire huh?

Probably you for performing something never before seen in natural history: having grown into a butterfly you went back into your chrysalis and came out again a slug

How many people did that influence?

A great many in so many subtle and untold ways : much like Promethean fire has influenced not only our sense of comfort on cold nights for millenia but our cooking, our spiritual concepts, our methods of torture, our symbolism and our architecture - to name but a few.

Your question is wrong. It's not "Who WAS the most influential person in History! It's "Who WILL BE..."

A question which is de dicto unanswerable, as opposed to one that we can at least speculate about... Sounds legit

unless you have a belief... then its pretty easy

Me.

The Most Influential would be Jesus Christ. Without him, Christianity would never have been born, Europe would be more Tribal and Divided in Terms of Religious Beliefs

I would say Thales of Miletus. changed the way of thinking. It is thought that it influenced the world in such a way that it basically created science

Hammurabi of Babylon.

The first real king of human history.

He was the first to establish a code of laws, meaning every nation is de facto influenced by him because they have laws.

He was the first to put his likeness on coinage, a precedent followed to this day.

His people passionately wrote every financial transaction, a practice common today.

They discovered several planets and objects of the solar system (not particularly credited to Hammurabi).

He established the customary system. That is right. When we use a ruler (named because it was the "ruler's foot, or something like that) it is actually Hammurabi's foot. Literally, a 5000 year old measurement. We are looking at Hammurabi's foot. Fascinating really.

If i recall, he set the stage for Babylon to dominate Mesopotamia for a long while, a particularly influential region to this day.

Influence is cumulative, and Hammurabi's influence has been around a long time.

Genghis - that is fascinating, and is not a figure I've come across. I'll look him up.

Hammurabi.... I guess that would be tough to beat....

Hammurabi's code wasn't the first code of laws in existence. It's predated, for example, by Mosaic Law. It's just a well-known example.

Here's a thought: the maximum amount of influence a person can have over humanity declines over time. If you act now, the "future" will be a much larger period of time and, if the impact of your actions grows exponentially (as you would expect it to- you affect a few people/events and they in turn affect more than that). Similarly, the ratio of people who have yet to be born to people who have already been in existence will constantly be shrinking. It's essentially the butterfly effect- a small change early on will lead to much larger differences in the long run.

When a human civilization's precursor group had 10 people, killing one of them would not only kill a tenth of the group but also drastically change the future- a tenth of the people are no longer going to be represented in the gene pool, that person's entire life's impacts are now gone, and so are their secondary and tertiary and quaternary impacts, etc.

So if you want to find the most influential person in human history, you'll probably have to look in the far past. Unfortunately, we don't have many records from the Neolithic Revolution that would help us, much less the Paleolithic era.

It just might be that the most influential person of all time is someone we won't ever even hear of.

fred flinstone

The guy who invented writing. Try recording history without that biatch!

Oral Traditions were used to record history before writing....

Genghis Khan

Edited 6/26/2015 18:52:42

Jesus Christ. Without him

No holocaust
No Crusades
No Killing of Native Americans (For religion)
No unified Europe
Possibly no Renaissance
No thirty years war
Much more slavery in Europe

So... When exactly was Europe unified? Anyway, perhaps the Persians would establish dominance in Europe. Then there would be next to NO slavery. A situation similar to the Holocaust could happen - Jews would still exist, they existed before Jesus. Perhaps crusades could still occur, but differently, with different religions. Same goes for thirty years war. Maybe they would have killed Native Americans, maybe they wouldn't. Without Jesus who knows what religion would have dominated Europe?

Edited 6/26/2015 19:22:41