I separate significance from importance (or relevance).
Importance is subjective. News about the health of my family members is important to me, but it is not significant to the world.
Significance is objective. It's about how much the event affects humanity as a whole.
I don’t agree with that, at least not in the present. We only know what’s truly significant when we reflect on history. There are very few things we can be certain are significant in the present. Climate change is likely one, but the US debt ceiling and the war in Ukraine don’t seem as likely to me, at least not in the human scale. There are also events that happen that don’t appear significant in the present but will be hugely significant in the future.
My goal with this project is not to get "true" significance but to have a setup that gets you 90% of the way there: an automated system that finds events that are likely to affect large groups of people or major systems and filters out most of everyday noise.
There will always be false-positives and false-negatives, but I think it's a good starting point and it should slowly get better as models get smarter.