World Solve

Microplastics have been found nearly everywhere scientists have looked, including soil and tap water, yet no affordable removal method exists at scale. This leaves an existing, growing contamination problem largely unaddressed.

Some jurisdictions already use AI risk assessments to help judges decide sentences, raising concerns about fairness, bias, and accountability. Whether machines should have this level of influence over human freedom remains ethically unresolved.

Migrant workers often pay steep fees to send money to family in their home countries, cutting into wages that are frequently already low. Cheaper remittance systems could meaningfully improve financial security for millions of families.

Access to affordable business loans is heavily skewed toward people who already have assets or established credit, locking out many capable entrepreneurs. A fairer lending system remains an unresolved economic gap.

Gödel's incompleteness theorems already showed some truths escape any fixed formal system, but the full boundary between provable and unprovable truths remains an active area of exploration. This shapes how we understand the limits of formal reasoning itself.

The Continuum Hypothesis asks whether there's a size of infinity strictly between the countable and uncountable, and it has been shown to be independent of standard mathematical axioms. This unresolved question touches the very foundation of set theory.

Gödel's theorems already limit what's possible here for sufficiently powerful systems, but the full landscape of alternative systems and their limitations remains an active and unresolved area of mathematical logic. This continues to shape our understanding of the foundations of mathematics itself.

If advanced artificial systems could one day be conscious, we'd face serious ethical obligations toward them, but we lack any reliable test for detecting genuine inner experience. This uncertainty already complicates debates about AI rights and welfare.

Methane traps far more heat than carbon dioxide in the short term, yet nearly all climate technology focuses on capturing carbon dioxide instead. A cheap way to actively remove atmospheric methane could meaningfully slow near-term warming.

Parts of the Greenland ice sheet may have already crossed tipping points where melting continues regardless of future emissions cuts. Understanding and potentially slowing this process remains one of climate science's most urgent unresolved challenges.

As Arctic ice recedes, increased shipping and resource extraction activity adds further pressure to already fragile polar ecosystems. Balancing economic interest with ecological protection in this newly accessible region remains unresolved.

Overgrazing, deforestation, and changing rainfall patterns continue to push arid regions toward full desertification faster than restoration projects can reverse. Scaling effective land restoration to match the pace of degradation remains unresolved.

Coastal development can interfere with natural sand replenishment processes, compounding the erosion already caused by rising sea levels. Balancing coastal development with long-term shoreline stability remains an unresolved planning challenge.

Advanced prosthetics with sensory feedback exist but remain far too expensive for widespread use, especially in lower-income regions where basic prosthetics are already hard to access. Closing this affordability gap remains an unresolved global health technology challenge.

If AI systems ever become capable of something like suffering, we would have created that suffering deliberately, and we don't have a moral framework ready for that possibility. This question is likely to become urgent faster than expected.

As automation and AI displace routine and increasingly cognitive labor, most economies still assume most people need traditional jobs to survive and find purpose. Without a credible alternative, mass automation risks instability rather than shared benefit.

Many large-scale policies are implemented based on assumptions rather than solid evidence, and by the time results come in, the damage or waste is already done. Better testing methods could save enormous public resources.

False information often reaches millions of people before any correction catches up, and by then the damage to public understanding is already done. Fixing this gap is critical to informed public debate.

Depression, anxiety, and other mental health conditions often go undetected until symptoms are already severe. Earlier, more reliable prediction could allow prevention instead of just treatment after the fact.

Entire island nations and coastal communities face losing their homes permanently, with no agreed international process for where they go or who helps pay for it. This is already happening, not just a future risk.