Norman Borlaug helped develop a lot of techniques used by developing nations to gain food self-sufficency.
Not just developing countries but the whole planet.
James Clerk Maxwell. If it uses electricity then it’s based on Maxwell’s equations.
Also if it uses light!
Politicians and kings rarely do something they weren’t forced to, and inventors are rarely without competition, so I take issue with most of the responses here.
Instead, I’ll go with naval officer Vasily Arkhipov, who, if he had decided to agree with the normal officers of the submarine he happened to be on, would have started a hot Cold War on 27 October, 1962.
Then again, there was a separate, slightly less severe close call the same day, so if you butterfly that who knows what else happens. It was a crazy time where few understood nuclear diplomacy and cold warfare, but nukes were ubiquitous, and were being treated like normal weapons. We got lucky.
There was another noteworthy case with Stanislav Petrov.
Yup. That one had a bit more wiggle room, though, because his superiors might have just come to the same conclusion he did. The other incident marked likely on the Wikipedia list is actually from France, which is almost funny to me. Can you imagine France doing a first strike out of nowhere?
James Color and Samantha Colour respectively, they invented color in their respective regions, before then the world was in black and white. Similar to Sandy Loam, very little is known about their personal life, or even what they look like. Hell, even their first names are up in the air.
It’s really tragic that we don’t celebrate the history of the people of Color the way we could.
Zorbulon, and you’ve likely never known it.
The person who figured out how to make fire
Norman Borlaug. His agricultural innovations have saved literal billions of of lives from starvation and malnutrition.
I had never heard of him, thank you for showing me this
Fritz Haber, the Veritasium video about him is fascinating (The Man who Killed Milioms and Saved Bilions). He developed the chemical process to efficiently synthesize ammonia, one of the key discoveries that allowed mass adoption of fertilizers and the incredibly rapid growth of the human population in the 20th century (you could say that thanks to him, bilions of people could live and be fed by modern agriculture).
Tragically, he also had a fundamental role in developing chemical weapons during WWI, although he belived their use would reduce the number of deaths as army would simply avoid gassed zones, so who knows if he really intended and believed in the milions of deaths he caused. Ironically, he also helped developing Zyklon B during the rise of nazism (while it was still used as a pesticide), but was quickly forced to flee from Germany because of jewish origin. Later, his last invention would be used to kill even more people.
There’s also a Sabaton song, “Father”, about him.
That’s where I first heard about him. Thanks, Spotify. I’ve learned more about European history from Sabaton and Iron Maiden than I have from school.
Someone else mention Borlaug in this thread, and it shows how no single person necessarily changed anything on their own, and how it’s difficult to put all the success as the result of a single person. Borlaug’s success was only possible by building on Haber’s work, just like Haber worked with Carl Bosch to accomplish what he did, and so on.
Seven Billion Humans: The World Fritz Haber Made
Haber therefore revolutionized the entire course of world history. The transformation of Asia and the emergence of China and India as giant, modern 21st-century global economies would never have been possible without Norman Borlaug’s miracle rice strains. But they could never have been grown had Haber not “extracted bread from air,” as his fellow Nobel laureate Max von Laue put it. Borlaug’s “miracle” strains of rice and grain require exceptionally vast inputs of the nitrate fertilizer that is still made from the process Fritz Haber discovered.
These fertilizers also require enormous inputs of oil. This means the dream of an oil-free world can never happen. Even if eternal, ever-renewable free energy could be harnessed from the sun or the cosmic currents of space, a world of seven billion people would still be desperately dependent on oil to make the nitrate fertilizer to grow the crops those people need to survive. The 21st century, like the 20th century, therefore, will still be Fritz Haber’s world.
Taylor Swift ❤️
Is this supposed to be ironic? Is this meant to instigate a discussion on her impact on pollution as an individual vs the value of her pop entertainment production?
No one changes me more than my girlfriend Taylor Swift 💖💖💖
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Inventor or investor? 😂
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Jesus Christ, hands down.
His brother started it.
His hands are typically displayed stretched out to the sides, not down.
Not even the most popular prophet from an Abrahamic religion. Second rate at best and losing to a war mongering pedophile at that.
An apocalyptic rabbi who’s had unfathomable violence done in his name? Yeah hey, thanks for the ‘be nice to each other’ rhetoric, but half the people spreading that message brought not peace but a sword.
And as a queer American I can attest his fanboys aren’t exactly polite on their own turf.
Mother Teresa
You might wanna research that.
The individuals or group that figured out the wheel
Whoever first domesticated fire. Whatever his name was, I forgot.
John Fire
Fire domestication happened before our species even existed. Who ever did it, made us possible. Great answer.
I’d bet fire was involved in his/her name. Either fire was named after the inventor or the inventor was named after fire.
I mean, that could actually be many people for all we know. Back that far it’s hard to even pin down the millennia something happened.
That was Ug. Really cool guy. His golf swing was immaculate, too.
Every hole, a hole in one.
And then his grandson invented the number two.
Joseph Stalin
Didn’t go far enough in denazifying the world, a consequence we now have to deal with today.
Stalin was not perfect; for instance, he stopped at Berlin. But he also defeated Hitler and built the Soviet Union into an industrial superpower.
I dont think the millions he was responsible for their deaths would agree.
You’re right, the millions of Nazis and Trotskyites killed by Stalin probably would not agree that he had a positive impact on humanity. Thankfully I am neither a Nazi nor a Trotskyite. Which are you?
You could have named a couple of different WW2 leaders that helped defeat the Nazi, why chose the person that is arguably as bad as hilter?
Just a heads up, conflating the guy who did the holocaust and the guy who ended it is literally antisemitism. That’s where like 90% of the hate for communism comes from, btw. That and ass-blasted slavers who now have to pay their employees humane wages because of unions.
This one guy posted a really good resource that explains this in more detail if you want to know more, I sadly don’t have the link myself.
How many people did Stalin kill via policy or directly?
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A fuck ton of nazis, but not enough.
You guys are aweful blood thirsty… I was actually referring to how many of his own people he killed.
Stalin is definitely not “Arguably as bad as Hitler”. The only major WWII leaders who were actually “Arguably as bad as Hitler” were Mussolini, Hirohito, Churchill, and Truman.
Let me guess… you are semi-communist so you like him but dont like the rest?
Right, let’s ignore all of the people forced to relocate their homes
