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If I had to put my money on who I think is alive right now and will be remembered five centuries from now, I’d have to say Bill Gates.
I think that’s a pretty safe bet, don’t you?
And probably Barack Obama.
Yup, that’s who I’m sticking with.
Who is alive now that will be remembered in 500 years?
AskReddit users shared their thoughts.
1. Pioneer.
“I think it’ll be Bill Gates. He’ll be associated with computers just like Gutenberg’s press.
Did he invent computers? No. But I think he’ll be remembered for it.”
2. A man of peace.
“The Dalai Lama.
This one is the last one.”
3. Probably.
“The first person to set foot on Mars.
This is a milestone from every perspective, and I am pretty sure this person is alive.”
4. Wow.
“Peter Higgs.
The ideation and identification of the Higgs Boson as an elementary particle.”
5. Not household names…yet.
“Accomplished Mathematicians, Physicists, Chemists, Computer Scientists, Doctors, Architects, Writers, Monarchs, and War Heroes.
All of whose names you don’t know today.”
6. God Save the Queen.
“Possibly the Queen of England.
Longest living/reigning monarch to date.
Even though her impact on the world is somewhat minimal, most of the Monarchs are remembered.”
7. Back in the USSR.
“Mikhail Gorbachev, for being the last leader of one of the world’s strongest empires.
And before you ask, Mikhail Gorbachev is still alive.
He is currently 90.”
8. I hope so!
“Rick Astley.
His image will be Rick Rolling people for generations.”
9. THE MAN.
“David Attenborough.
People in 500 years will watch those documentaries in school learning about how nature used to be.
And then how we f**ked it all up.”
10. The melody.
“Paul McCartney.
His songs have legs. I think musicians will be remembered more than politicians and business people.
Melodies get remembered.”
11. Rules with an iron fist.
“Vladimir Putin.
We have records of emperors spanning back thousands of years from different nations.
Putin is an emperor in all but name.”
12. Do you know about him?
“Andrew Wiles for proving Fermat’s Last Theorem.
Mathematicians, physicists, scientists, etc. that championed significant results and whose names are carved into terms and concepts within their fields forever are the ones whose names will be studied even 500 years from now, unless a field completely d**s out.
These are the people that nobody, outside of professionals in the field, knows about today; but do you really think the general public knew who Newton or Galileo or Copernicus were during their lifetimes?
Also personal opinion, I don’t think Hawking will be remembered 500 years from now by anybody but people working in the physics of blackholes or I suppose I’ll be generous and extend it to quantum gravity as a whole.
The problem is, in 500 years these fields will be expanded so much that these individual names will become further and fewer, so you really have to be of legendary status in the significance of your work and frankly, I don’t believe Hawking did as much as some of the greatest physicists alive even today.
Physicists like Leonard Susskind, Witten, Penrose (debatable), and Weinberg (I’m going to count him because he literally just passed away a month ago) are the ones whose names have been attached to a wide variety of fields within theoretical physics or physics as a whole and will probably be known as fathers of a certain subfield they helped create or inspired.
Additionally, mathematicians like Wiles, Terrence Tao, Perelman, etc. will have their names attached to proofs or entire fields of mathematics in the future. We aren’t going to stop studying math or physics.”
What do you think?
Let us know in the comments!
Thanks a lot!
