A View from the Year 3000: A Ranking of the 100 Most Influential Persons of All Time, is a book by Arturo Kukeni. The cover notes that Kukeni is a descendant of the author of The 100, the book upon which A View is based. As the subtitle announces, the book consists of a list of historical figures ordered by Kukeni's opinion of their influence on the world. Each individual gets a short biography, usually about five pages long, that emphasizes the person's influence on the world and includes an explanation of why they are ranked where they are in the book. Because the list is based on influence, it is somewhat different than if it were based on greatness. For instance, Tabora Majunga gets in, but Liang Wen Zhen doesn't (although he does get an honorable mention at the end of the book).

Confused? You should be. The people I mentioned in the previous paragraph haven't been born yet. A View from the Year 3000 is a science fiction version of The 100, written by Michael H. Hart but attributed to his fictional descendant, born in the year 2801 and, due to incredible advances in biology and medicine, still living in 3000. This means that in essence this book is Hart's prediction of what is to come in the next thousand years: life extension, world government, interstellar exploration, brainwashing, and reversible sex-change operations, among other things.

Kukeni ranks Chang Po-Yao, the inventor of a technique for uploading and downloading memories to the brain, as the most influential person ever. According to the book, Chang was born in 2213 and is also still living in 3000. Kukeni outlines a system in which new brain tissue is grown to replace a patient's deteriorating brain and the patient's brain is surgically replaced with this tissue, into which their memories are installed. Combined with replacements for other organs, this technique leads to pseudo-immortality, a condition that has numerous effects on the world, including greater political stability and better environmental protection.

Hart does not only include fictional characters in this book, however. The highest ranked real person in the book is Isaac Newton, ranked fifth. Interestingly, he ranks such real people rather differently in this book than in The 100, in which, for instance, Newton was number two and Muhammad was number one. These changes represent increases in the influence of science (especially genetics) and the arts and decreases in those of religion and politics, partly caused by greater wealth and equality.

Below is the beginning of Kukeni's list from A View from the Year 3000. Spelling and comments are Hart/Kukeni's.

  1. Chang Po-Yao: Neurosurgeon, medical innovator (brain-replacement operations, "pseudo-immortality")
  2. Miklos Szabo: Biologist, inventor (brainwashing machines)
  3. Pridi Thanarat: Statesman (led rebellion against Majunga to avert tyranny)
  4. Rukmini Gopal: Medical innovator (reversable sex-change operations)
  5. Isaac Newton: Physicist, mathematician, astronomer
  6. Johannes Gutenberg: Inventor (printing with movable type)
  7. Euclid: Mathematician
  8. Jesus Christ: Religious leader
  9. Muhammad: Religious leader
  10. Louis Pasteur: Medical researcher (germ theory of disease; innoculation)

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