Who is/was the most important person ever?

[waltzingparrot]

Just listened to an interview and a 'name' was suggested as being the most important person ever in our planet's history.

If you had to name one person as being the most important, who would it be?

Presumably without what they invented/did/said, our life today would be unrecognisable.

I immediately have a list of a dozen or so really important people throughout history, but I don't know how to rank them and come up with a no 1.

Fun fact about Florence nightingale... her research is very very sketchy. Compared deaths in winter with summer, when she'd implemented hygiene in summer.
And the graphs she produced are so complex no one at the time (or since??!!) understood them. She absolutely blinded them with science.

Fair play

Professor Sir Alec Jeffrey’s who discovered/developed the technique of DNA fingerprinting.

It has freed innocent people, allowed guilty people to be traced and convicted, allowed us to verify the identity of people who are long dead - Richard III, victims of crime. It enables us to establish paternity and trace family trees.

It has led to many other scientific developments in genetics.

True.

She was right about infectious disease management and ventilation though.
And the idea of presenting data visually in order to get the message across was huge.

Flawed but hugely influential, far more for good than ill.

I agree Mary Seacole was impressive and didn't get the recognition she truly deserved. She worked in far more danger than Florence Nightingale without the medicines and support.
But with the support Florence Nightingale received, I believe her legacy is greater.

Euclid
or Aristotle

I'm inclined to say someone from the field of science or technology. But as everyone points out, someone else would have (or did) do the same thing.

So I'll say Jesus or Shakespeare.

You've got it mixed up. Islam is a tribal based religion which sees itself as the one true religion of the Abrahamatic faiths because it is the last one. They might backdate their lineage but ultimately it is a 6th century religion based on conquest and tribal culture that in their eyes supercedes all those that have come before.

ElizabethBest sorry, but that just isn't true:
https://www.thearticle.com/mary-seacole-the-triumph-of-ideological-narrative-in-the-history-of-nursing?origin=serp_auto

A few people have said Tim Berners Lee, but in that line I would go back to Alan Turing and Tommy Flowers for their work at Bletchley Park that led to the development of modern computers, without which much research and development would not be possible today, and then back to Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage who started the whole calculating machines off.

All the people who invented a mode of covered transport.

Thank god we don't have to walk everywhere in the pissing rain or ride a bloody horse.

I think it's an impossible question to answer, but having skimmed the replies, I'm going with the first unnamed human to express compassion. I might be mis-remembering, but I think it was discovered as someone found a skeleton of a person who'd survived a broken bone, meaning that they must have been looked after and tended to. This is the basis for civilisation, and still something we're trying to perfect today.

But also, when I read your thread title, before reading your post, I was coming on to say my mum! Unfortunately though, she hasn't reached the level of national or global significance, so you may not have heard of her.

Of recent timidest, Hitler?

But without transport means, "normal" people wouldn't be travelling anywhere beyond realistic walking/horse riding distance for their day to day lives. Things we needed would be local. It's only because we have transport options that things have become more fragmented and spread. But even back in the days of horses, people still used boats/rafts to cross rivers, etc.

I'm a die hard Atheist, but I can't deny the significant impact religious figures like Jesus and the Qur'an equivalents have had on the world.

Life would look SIGNIFICANTLY different with some of the major world religions. The rights of women would be different, scientific progression would have looked different, our laws would be different, etc.

It doesn't even matter if these figures are real or not. They've still had the most impact.

There is evidence. Egyptian hieroglyphs contemporary to the period mention him, and which were only deciphered in relatively recent times with the help of the Rosetta Stone.

No they don't. They found some ancient Egyptian text, not hieroglyphs, that mention the crucifixion story but it was written 800 years too late to be contemporary! And in Egypt!