We do not know who invented zero. Or who identified earth to be a sphere. Or who wrote the sequence 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 ... . We just pick a name and associate them to our liking.

So when another colonizer comes up, we will have newer people associated with these. Hope it does not happen. But history does say so.

Humanity as a whole, perhaps not; but that is not the same as what cultures within do, and cultures have many ways to erase or diminish outsiders — and everyone's an outsider to some group.

Newton, Leibniz; Einstein, Lorenz and Riemann; Shannon, Kolmogorov; Crick, Franklin.

When the context is, to quote the parent comment:

> I look at some names and think, "who?" or "I've heard the name, but know nothing about him." I mean, of course you can still read about them, but that even a US President can be largely forgotten as a household name within 250 years is really a stunning thing to think about

I suspect only Newton and Einstein are even household names. I'd be very surprised if the average person has heard of even one of Lorenz, Riemann, Shannon, Kolmogorov, or Crick, even today, and my guess is that Franklin would probably be assumed to be an associate of either Roosevelt or Benjamin, given the widely claimed but inconsistently cited survey that 12% of Americans think Joan of Arc was Noah's wife.

And Crick's other famous research associate was Watson; I wonder how many times people got him mixed up with the fictional character, or briefly for the IBM computer.

To your point, I was thinking that this might only be stunning for someone with a modern view of the US Presidency. I understand that the powers of the office and the election campaigns for it were quite different in earlier eras.

However, I remember someone who went to MIT observing the same thing about the names of the great scientists and philosophers etched onto the buildings. He noted that he only knew what a few of them did.