World Solve

Losing species and healthy ecosystems carries real economic consequences, from reduced crop pollination to fewer new medicines, but this cost rarely shows up clearly in economic decision-making. Building this into policy remains largely unresolved.

Public hearings and consultations are often required by law but sometimes function more as formalities than genuine two-way input processes. Making these processes truly meaningful remains an unresolved governance challenge.

Antibiotics are widely used in livestock farming to prevent disease and promote growth, contributing significantly to antibiotic resistance in humans. Reducing this use without harming farmers' livelihoods remains a persistent unresolved challenge.

Dental problems can affect overall health significantly, yet dental care is often separated from general healthcare systems and priced out of reach for many. Closing this gap remains an overlooked but serious healthcare access issue.

Air pollution contributes to respiratory and cardiovascular disease in millions of people living in polluted urban areas, and treatment only addresses symptoms, not exposure. Reducing the exposure itself remains the harder, unresolved half of the problem.

Fertilizer runoff from farms feeds harmful algae blooms in nearby lakes, damaging drinking water and local ecosystems. Preventing this at the source remains cheaper than treating it after the fact, but adoption is still limited.

Current wearables track surface-level signals like heart rate well, but measuring things like blood chemistry non-invasively remains far less reliable. Solving this could make preventive healthcare monitoring dramatically more accessible.

Digital voting could make elections more accessible, but concerns about tampering and verification have kept most systems limited to smaller-scale trials. A fully trusted, secure digital voting system remains unbuilt at national scale.

Self-driving systems handle most driving scenarios well, but rare, unusual situations still trip them up in ways human drivers might handle intuitively. Closing this reliability gap remains essential before full autonomy becomes truly safe.

Assistive technology has improved, but truly seamless, affordable control of phones, computers, and home devices for people with paralysis remains out of reach for many. Progress here could dramatically improve daily independence.

Medical research benefits enormously from large shared datasets, but combining that with true patient privacy protection remains technically and legally unresolved. Better methods could unlock research without compromising individual privacy.

Evidence suggests Mars once had liquid water, a key ingredient for life, but no mission has yet found conclusive proof of past or present microbes. Answering this remains one of planetary science's biggest open questions.

We have very good approximations, but no exact formula exists that perfectly predicts the count of primes below a chosen number. Improving this approximation remains an active and important area of research.

Twin primes are pairs of prime numbers that differ by only two, and mathematicians strongly suspect there are infinitely many, but nobody has proven it. This remains one of number theory's oldest open questions.

International law sets minimum obligations toward refugees, but whether wealthier nations have a deeper moral duty beyond the legal minimum remains a genuinely contested ethical question.

Every major technology carries some risk of misuse or unintended harm, but there's no agreed standard for how much risk is acceptable before restricting or slowing development.

Poverty, trauma, and social conditions can heavily influence behavior, but there's no settled agreement on how much this should reduce someone's responsibility for their actions.

Allowing payment for organs or surrogacy could increase availability and help people in need, but also raises concerns about exploitation of the poor. Society remains deeply divided on where ethical limits should sit.

Some inequality is often seen as a natural result of differing effort or luck, but there's no agreed threshold for when it becomes unjust. Different political philosophies answer this question in fundamentally incompatible ways.

Gig work can offer flexibility but often comes with unpredictable income swings that make financial planning difficult for workers. A system that offers more income stability without eliminating flexibility remains unresolved.