The most important thing that happened today is often only apparent in retrospect. For example, Google was founded on Sept 4, 1998. But that event was not on the front page of national newspapers. Even the founders didn’t know how big it would be.

Can we devise rankings that prioritize the important — or at least the potentially important — above the merely new? Perhaps if there were some kind of public dependency graph for events (births, deaths, everything) you might be able to start identifying the most influential.

The rough idea is that if you had a stream of every major event, you could start finding highly cited and impactful things. Businesses gaining traction, ideas gaining influence. A chronologically ordered web crawl is a messy v1. Maybe in 20 years we’d use public chains as a v2.