World Solve

For decades, computer chips got faster mainly by shrinking transistors, but they're now near the smallest physically possible size. Finding a new way to keep computing power growing is an open engineering problem.

When an AI makes a harmful decision, it's often unclear whether the blame falls on the developer, the user, or the company deploying it. Without clear rules, victims of AI mistakes often have no clear path to accountability.

Fake videos and voice clones are now realistic enough to fool most people, and detection tools often lag behind the technology creating them. Left unresolved, this threatens trust in video and audio evidence itself.

As AI moves from answering questions to taking real actions, like managing money or controlling machinery, mistakes carry real consequences. We still lack agreed safety standards for how much autonomy is safe to hand over.

Billions of people still lack reliable, affordable internet, cutting them off from education, healthcare information, and economic opportunity. Closing this gap remains a matter of infrastructure cost, not lack of demand.

Nearly every major hack traces back to a bug that existed long before anyone found it. Catching these flaws before release, rather than after damage is done, remains an unsolved challenge.

Modern AI models are often accurate but operate like black boxes, even to the people who built them. Without a way to explain their reasoning, it's hard to trust them in medicine, law, or other high-stakes decisions.

Current searches scan a tiny fraction of the sky and only for a narrow range of signals. Without better tools, we may be missing evidence of other intelligent life simply because we aren't looking in the right way.

Neuroscience can map which brain regions activate during thought, but nobody can explain why that activity produces subjective experience at all. This gap separates our understanding of the brain from any real understanding of the mind.

We know roughly when life began, but not the exact chemical steps that turned non-living matter into something that could reproduce. Solving this would also tell us where else in the universe life might arise.

According to our best theories, matter and antimatter should have destroyed each other completely after the Big Bang. Yet matter clearly won out, and we still don't know why.

Thousands of pieces of space junk are already circling the planet, threatening satellites and future missions. Left unresolved, orbit could become too cluttered and risky to safely launch into.

Gravity should be pulling everything together over time, yet distant galaxies are accelerating away from each other. This mystery, blamed on dark energy, remains one of the biggest open questions in physics.

Growing crops in space or on other planets means dealing with low gravity, radiation, and limited water and soil. Without solving this, any permanent settlement beyond Earth stays dependent on costly resupply missions.

Outside Earth's magnetic field, cosmic radiation raises cancer risk and can damage the brain and body over time. This is one of the biggest blockers to sending humans to Mars safely.

Dark matter and dark energy make up roughly ninety five percent of the universe, yet we've never directly detected either. Everything we can see and touch is a small fraction of what's really out there.

Gravity describes the large scale universe well, and quantum mechanics describes the tiny scale well, but the two don't fit together mathematically. A unified theory would finally explain what happens inside black holes and at the birth of the universe.

Current approaches to real-time monitoring and response systems for industrial chemical and oil spill events either underperform under variable field conditions or generate externalities that undermine long-term sustainability and equity. Closing the gap requires coordinated advances in science, systems design and enabling institutions.

Achieving protocols for equitable and rapid distribution of medical countermeasures in pandemics at meaningful scale demands simultaneous progress in fundamental research, engineering integration and socio-technical systems that work for low- and middle-income settings. Existing efforts remain fragmented relative to the magnitude of the challenge.

The absence of robust, context-adapted solutions for education approaches that build the capacity for systems thinking and long-term decision making creates cascading risks across interconnected human and natural systems. Key missing elements include durable performance, low lifetime cost, and governance arrangements capable of sustaining impact beyond pilot stages.