World Solve

International agreements to reduce deforestation often rely on inconsistent or delayed data, making enforcement difficult. Better real-time tracking could hold countries and companies accountable for logging commitments.

Almost all current reusable rocket technology is built for missions close to Earth, while deep space missions still rely on expensive, largely disposable hardware. Extending reusability further out could reshape space exploration economics.

Valuable datasets from completed research projects are sometimes lost entirely once funding and staff move on, wasting years of prior work. A shared system for preserving this data long-term remains underdeveloped.

Some argue extreme wealth carries an obligation to help others, while others see it purely as a matter of personal choice. Philosophy hasn't settled this question in any way most people accept.

Public transit systems that depend heavily on fares often struggle financially, leading to service cuts that push more people toward driving. A more sustainable funding model remains unresolved in many cities.

Chronic fatigue syndrome leaves patients severely limited in daily function, yet its underlying biological cause remains poorly understood and often dismissed. Without a clear cause, effective treatment remains extremely difficult to develop.

Blood donation shortages remain a recurring problem worldwide, especially during emergencies when demand spikes suddenly. Lab-grown blood could remove dependence on donor supply entirely, but the technology isn't yet practical at scale.

A small number of people show natural resistance to certain infections or conditions, and understanding why could reveal entirely new treatment approaches. This resistance remains only partially understood at a genetic level.

Cooling saves lives during extreme heat, but most air conditioners rely on energy sources and refrigerants that contribute to climate change. A low-emission cooling solution accessible to poorer regions remains urgently needed.

Bees and other pollinators face combined pressure from pesticides, habitat loss, and disease, and addressing just one threat rarely solves the overall decline. A comprehensive solution addressing all major threats together remains unbuilt.

Raising cattle and other livestock produces a significant share of global methane emissions, yet meat remains a major part of diets worldwide. A lower-emission farming method that doesn't require giving up meat entirely remains unsolved.

Old software often becomes unusable as operating systems and hardware change around it, forcing costly rewrites or abandonment. Designing for genuine long-term durability is rarely prioritized.

These particles carry more energy than anything we can produce on Earth, and we still don't know exactly what cosmic event launches them our way. Identifying the source could reveal entirely new astrophysical processes.

Every lunar mission so far has been short-term, relying entirely on supplies brought from Earth. A base that grows its own food, recycles its own water, and generates its own power would prove long-term space settlement is possible.

Some modern proofs rely heavily on computer verification because they're too long or complex for any person to check by hand, raising open questions about whether shorter, purely human-verifiable proofs must always exist. This unresolved tension touches both mathematics and epistemology.

Even our best physical models rely on approximations or idealized assumptions, and whether a truly complete and exact mathematical simulation is even theoretically possible remains unresolved. This touches on the deep relationship between mathematics and the physical world.

Modern cryptography largely depends on problems assumed, but not proven, to be computationally hard, leaving a theoretical gap in fully guaranteed security. This unresolved foundation underlies much of digital security today.

Some extremal problems in combinatorics have only been resolved through massive computational brute force, without a more elegant general proof explaining why the answer must be exactly what it is. This unresolved gap raises questions about the nature of mathematical understanding itself.

While many specific systems have proven solutions, a complete general guarantee across every well-posed nonlinear system remains one of mathematics' harder open questions. This affects fields ranging from physics to engineering that rely on such systems.

Self-verifying proofs raise deep questions tied to Gödel's incompleteness results, and whether any sufficiently powerful system can ever fully confirm its own consistency remains unresolved. This continues to shape foundational debates in mathematical logic.