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The point of Probaway’s Person of the Year search is to ferret out those people or things whose actions this year has the possibility of being remembered, or still directly used, 500 years in the future. All of the following people, chosen by TIME, are very successful at what they are doing but only a very few, if any, will be remembered in the distant future. The bolded names are possible long term entries.

TIME’s list of Potential Person of the Year

  1. Wael Ghonim – Precipitated Egyptian lurch toward democracy.
  2. Joseph Stiglitz – Economist at Columbia University.
  3. Reed Hastings – Created Netflix a decade ago.
  4. Amy Poehler – A funny sitcom actor.
  5. Geoffrey Canada – Innovative school teacher.
  6. Mark Zuckerberg – Facebook continues to thrive.
  7. Peter Vesterbacka – Created video game Angry Birds.
  8. Angela Merkel – Leads Germany to goodness.
  9. Julian Assange – The suffering face of WikiLeaks.
  10. Ron Bruder – Education for the Middle East.
  11. Lamido Sanusi – Nigeria’s honest banker.
  12. Colin Firth – Human actor.
  13. Amy Chua – Tiger mom author.
  14. Joe Biden – VP providing insider information for President.
  15. Jennifer Egan – An author.
  16. Kim Clijsters – A tennis champion.
  17. Ahmed Shuja Pasha – Pakistan’s Intelligence Chief
  18. Aung San Suu Kyi – Nobel Freedom Fighter for democracy.
  19. Cory Booker – Mayor of Newark, NJ.
  20. Gabrielle Giffords – Brain injured congresswoman.
  21. Katsunobu Sakurai – Mayor near Fukushima reactor.
  22. Michelle Obama – President’s wife supports action-diet.
  23. Paul Ryan – Governor of Wisconsin
  24. Ai Weiwei – Chinese social activist.
  25. Rob Bell – a “willing suspension of disbelief.”
  26. Fathi Terbil – Sparked the toppling of Gaddafi.
  27. Dilma Rousseff – 1st woman president of Brazil.
  28. Tom Ford – designer and new film director.
  29. Liang Guanglie – China’s weapons minister.
  30. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh – Bonobo mom
  31. Takeshi Kanno – Doctor hero of tsunami
  32. Nicolas Sarkozy – Took out Gaddafi.
  33. Michele Bachmann – US presidential candidate.
  34. Saad Mohseni – Afghan media mogul
  35. Chris Christie – Governor of New Jersey
  36. Matthew Weiner – Mad Men creator
  37. Lisa Jackson – heads Environmental Protection Agency
  38. Jean-Claude Trichet – Europe’s banker
  39. Justin Bieber – Entertainer
  40. Prince William and Kate Middleton – Cinderella
  41. Joe Scarborough – political analyst
  42. Blake Lively – Lively actress
  43. Hillary Clinton – US Secretary of State
  44. Muqtada al-Sadr – Iraqi power broker
  45. Anwar al-Awlaki – American turned Arab terrorist
  46. Kim Jong Un – New head of North Korea
  47. Saif al-Islam Gaddafi – Gaddafi’s captured son
  48. Hassan Nasrallah – Leader of Lebanon
  49. Nathan Wolfe – Preventative virologist
  50. Oprah Winfrey – Founded informative TV channel
  51. Sergio Marchionne – Energized an auto company
  52. Mahendra Singh Dhoni – India’s symbol of hope
  53. Felisa Wolfe-Simon – living with less phosphorus
  54. Esther Duflo – accurate data sleuth of poverty
  55. Rain – South Korean actor
  56. Larry Page – Google CEO
  57. Mia Wasikowska – Irish actress
  58. David Cameron – Prime Minister of England
  59. John Lasseter – head of Pixar films
  60. Maria Bashir – Afghanistan’s hope for good laws
  61. Mukesh Ambani – Self made Indian billionaire
  62. Chris Colfer – made underdogs into acceptable men
  63. General Margaret Woodward – Destroyed Gaddafi
  64. Bruno Mars – musician stage artist
  65. David and Charles Koch – rich activists
  66. Hung Huang – Chinese cultural leader
  67. General David Petraeus – counterinsurgency author
  68. Matt Damon and Gary White – clean water
  69. Cecile Richards – women’s rights advocate
  70. George R.R. Martin – author
  71. Marine Le Pen – French nationalist leader
  72. Grant Achatz – creator of new-style foods
  73. Feisal Abdul Rauf – Muslim preacher at Ground Zero
  74. El Général – Tunisian rap star
  75. Jamie Dimon – super banker
  76. Heidi Murkoff – child birthing author
  77. Sting – Song writer
  78. Jonathan Franzen – agitating author
  79. V.S. Ramachandran – effective brain research
  80. Michelle Rhee – kids’ education champion
  81. Mark Wahlberg – actor producer
  82. Rebecca Eaton – Masterpiece producer
  83. Xi Jinping – heir apparent to China’s top post
  84. Kathy Giusti – effective research to drugs
  85. Arianna Huffington – media news mogul upstart
  86. Barack Obama – hope-promising man who didn’t deliver
  87. Lionel Messi – soccer super star
  88. Azim Premji – India’s outsourcing mogul
  89. Aruna Roy – India’s force for the poor
  90. Ray Chambers – 120 million malaria nets
  91. Scott Rudin – screenplay rewriter
  92. John Boehner – Speaker of the US House
  93. Derrick Rossi – stem-cell success
  94. Hu Shuli – Chinese news publisher
  95. Benjamin Netanyahu – versus Iraq
  96. Ayman Mohyeldin – Egyptian reporter
  97. Charles Chao – censored China’s internet
  98. Bineta Diop – African women’s rights
  99. Dharma Master Cheng Yen – humanitarian
  100. Patti Smith – & Mapplethorpe

It doesn’t make much sense that any of these people would be remembered in 500 years for something they did this years. However, Felisa Wolf-Simon’s discovery of of microbes that were able to replace some of their genetic phosphorus with other elements, just might possibly turn out to be a cosmos shaking event. It may take a lot of research to verify or deny that possibility.