

Who will be remembered 1,000 years from now? - dcaldwell

Of people who lived in the last 100 years (currently alive or deceased), who do you think will still be remembered 1,000 years from now?
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winestock
The best way to answer that question is to flip the sign bit and the verb
tense. Whom do we remember best from the past one thousand years? Or longer?

The best way to be remembered across the millenia is to be either a sage of
some sort (philosopher, mathematician, prophet, law-giver) or to kill a lot of
people (conqueror, ruler, and so forth).

Therefore, the people who lived in the past hundred years who will be best
remembered a thousand years from now will be Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin,
Adolf Hitler, Mao Tse-Tung, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and some thinkers
that you've never heard of but that ultra-conservative Christians love to
quote.

"Those of you who will live into the twenty-first century, come put a wreath
on my grave, because this will be the slogan: No more twentieth centuries…" -
Isaac Asimov (1974)

Have a nice day, and pleasant dreams.

~~~
MostAwesomeDude
Along those lines, I'm going to go with the great philosophers of the past
century, Sartre and Nietzsche; the murderers Hitler and Pol Pot, the physicist
Einstein, the revolutionaries Guevara and Lenin, the composer Shostakovich,
and the mathematician Gödel.

(Yes, I know that Neitzsche and Lenin have a half-century head start. They're
still worth mentioning for their enduring legacies, and Lenin's gonna be lying
in that glass box for a _long_ time.)

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drcode
My guesses for who's name will be most widely known by an average person 1000
years from now, no particular order:

Hitler

Neil Armstrong

Gandhi (showing effectiveness of nonviolent resistance)

Einstein

Vanevar Bush (for his essay "As We May Think")

Bin Laden (showing power of terrorism)

Craig Venter (as important early bioengineer)

Milton Friedman (market economics)

Lawrence Roberts (Arpanet)

Steve Jobs (mainly just for the iPhone)

William Shockley (Head of transistor team)

Wright Brothers

Richard Stallman (Just because DRM will always exist and he will be known as
an early popularizer of related issues)

Darwin will be far more important than any of these, but is outside your date
range.

Who I don't think will make the cut: Tim Berners Lee (world wide web will be
too anachronistic) Turing (no emotional resonance with his work, unlike
Vanevar Bush)

~~~
akavi
Most of those people are relatively unknown now, outside of specialized
fields.

viz. Bush, Venter, Roberts, Shockley, Stallman.

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cellis
As long as we have the technology we have today, everyone notable. If there is
a nuclear war, biological outbreak or other 1000x Black Swan event, perhaps no
one. Those who do survive an apocalypse won't be too worried about remembering
anyone as they'll be too busy foraging and trying to defend themselves from
roving bands of cannibals.

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thiagofm
Albert einstein, bohr, schrodinger(text books), zizek(still alive!), gandhi
and neil armstrong.

The people that will be remembered in 1000 years aren't actually those
frequently in the media(say, steve jobs), steve jobs is clearly overhyped and
will fade away just like justin bieber did.

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pitchups
A partial list - \- Albert Einstein (relativity) \- Bohr, Born, Schrodinger,
Heisenberg, Dirac (quantum mechanics) \- Kurt Godel (incompleteness theorem)
\- Alan Turing (universal computer) \- Steve Jobs, Bill Gates (computers,
software/philanthropy) \- Tim Berners Lee (world wide web)

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adrianwaj
Maybe Reinhold Messner, Neil Armstrong and someone that invents the next
widely used cryptocurrency.

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Aron
Memories 1,000 years from now will be pretty impressive. So I'll go with
'everyone who has been mentioned somewhere on the Web right now'.

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petervandijck
Depends on the dominant culture/... in 1000 years. History is written by the
victors.

~~~
userulluipeste
You're right about that! In Soviet Union a lot of discoveries were attributed
to some russian figures! ...or at best, their real authors weren't mentioned
at all. An entire history & reality rewritten!

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diolpah
1000 years? That is a timeframe long enough to virtually guarantee the
occurrence of the Singularity, so I would have to say
Vinge/Kurzweil/Eliezer/Goertzel/De Garis, or whomever switches on the first
self-modifying artificial general intelligence.

