Re: Greatest People of All Time
 

Joseph Campbell
David Attenborough

Re: Greatest People of All Time
 

Nielsio

Re: Greatest People of All Time
 

I don't think any artist can really compare to a great scientist in this debate. I feel like if you remove a single artist or writer it would suck to not have their work but things would be pretty much the same. Of course if Einstein never existed we would have found everything he discovered but it is hard to tell how long it would have taken. For an artist to have that kind of impace it would have to be something like lving in a world where Go Dog Go is considered a great piece of literature and Shakesphere comes along and gives us Hamlet. I don't think anything like that has evern happened.

Re: Greatest People of All Time
 

[ QUOTE ]
I don't think any artist can really compare to a great scientist in this debate. I feel like if you remove a single artist or writer it would suck to not have their work but things would be pretty much the same. Of course if Einstein never existed we would have found everything he discovered but it is hard to tell how long it would have taken. For an artist to have that kind of impace it would have to be something like lving in a world where Go Dog Go is considered a great piece of literature and Shakesphere comes along and gives us Hamlet. I don't think anything like that has evern happened.

[/ QUOTE ]

I think thats a pretty decent argument. I'm not some philistine who thinks art is useless or that "my 5 year old nephew could do that" but I think that you can legitimately say that if Van Gogh never lived we'd never notice the difference, and the NEXT best painter ever would give everyone just as much pleasure. Art seems to me to be more of a relative accomplishment. Maybe I'm way off, I admittedly know very little about art. Wheras someone who invented some useful technology has an objective and calculable impact on the world that is irreplacable. Sure someone would have eventually made the same discovery (probably) but that would have taken X years and resulted in Y millions of people suffering.

Re: Greatest People of All Time
 

chuck noris iirc

Re: Greatest People of All Time
 

If greatness is easing the suffering of humanity then it would be hard to leave out transcendent artists.

My additions:

Mozart
The Beatles
Andy Warhol
Leonardo Da Vinci (can't believe no one has said this yet)
Michael Jordan (seriously)
Ghandi
Confucius
Aristotle
Alexander the Great
Isaac Newton
Babe Ruth
Charles Darwin
John Locke
Hobbes
Thomas Paine
Abraham Lincoln
Benjamin Franklin
Muhammad Ali
The Wright Brothers
Rosa Parks
Rockefeller
Alexander Graham Bell
Cesar Chavez
FDR
Bill Gates
Nikola Tesla
Galileo
George Washington
J.S. Mill
Thomas Edison
Caesar
Picasso
Magellan

Re: Greatest People of All Time
 

Einstein. Not for the scientific accomplishments themselves, but for the in-your-face confrontation with the non-reality of reality. Up until them we were just swapping about various views of an understandable universe.---
The earth is flat ... nope, it's sphere.
The sun orbits the earth ... nope, the earth is orbiting.
Frogs emerge spontaneously from mud ...nope.

Time not being time, space not being space, speed not being speed .. not that they were changed but changed into properties that we don't relate to. Until Einstein we were just rearranging the furniture.

luckyme

Re: Greatest People of All Time
 

Limiting to the as yet unmentioned:

Politics:
Madison
Jefferson
Lech Walesa

Philosophy:
That Buddha dude
Popper

Art:
De Niro
Orson Welles
Groening
Dylan

Misc:
Mandela

Re: Greatest People of All Time
 

More:

Copernicus
Pythagoras
Euclid
Parmenides
Columbus
Guttenberg
Karl Marx
Napolean
Machiavelli
Decartes
St. Augustine
Freud
Voltaire
Francis Bacon
Henry Ford
Homer
James Cook
Marco Polo
Socrates
Aquinas
Adam Smith

Re: Greatest People of All Time
 

These are some very good lists. My additions that I didn't see already would have to be:

Richard Feynman (just a badass)

Alan Turing (persecuted for being homosexual, years ahead of his time, basically invented the computer)

John Bardeen, William Shockley, Walter Brattain (won 1956 nobel prize for inventing the transistor, most fundamental unit of all modern electronics)

Eli Whitney (industrial revolution pioneer, convinced the world that interchangeable parts would lead to a whole new standard of living. Oh yeah and he invented the cotton gin.)

Carl Rogers Darnall (suggested chlorinating drinking water, number of lives saved is off the charts)