World Solve

Addressing background checks failing is critical for achieving the 2030 Agenda. Current efforts fall short in scale, speed and equity, leaving the most vulnerable behind. Any viable solution must function in low-resource settings with limited specialists, transport, laboratory capacity and broadband. Proposals should specify quantifiable biological, social or environmental outcomes, openly discuss potential risks, and present a realistic pathway for long-term maintenance and local ownership beyond short research pilots.

Climate events, cyberattacks, and conflict can demand action faster than standard legislative processes allow. The open problem is creating emergency authorities with strong checks, expiration rules, and public review. This becomes particularly difficult in informal settlements, because public institutions must remain fair, resilient, and accountable while adapting to new risks.

Border systems may increasingly use risk scoring, biometric checks, and predictive screening. The unresolved problem is ensuring security tools do not become opaque instruments of arbitrary exclusion or rights violations. The challenge is especially acute in informal settlements, where legacy systems, coordination failures, and weak oversight can magnify harm.

Once a company achieves significant market dominance, it can sometimes reduce quality or add restrictions with little competitive consequence, since users have few comparable alternatives. Preventing this kind of unchecked degradation remains an unresolved market structure issue.

AI can now generate fake news articles, complete with realistic writing style and structure, faster than fact-checkers can identify and flag them. This growing speed gap threatens public trust in written information generally.

Modern AI models produce answers without a clear, checkable chain of reasoning, making it hard to know if a correct answer was reached for the right reasons. Verifiable reasoning is essential before AI can be trusted in high-stakes decisions.

Viral misinformation has fueled real-world violence and health misinformation in several countries with weak media literacy programs. Fact-checking tools integrated directly into popular messaging apps could slow its spread.

Aquatic ecosystems that once supported fisheries and clean water now suffer from decades of unchecked industrial and agricultural runoff. Bioremediation research and stricter pollution-discharge enforcement are needed.

Because operators on Earth must check every step, rovers cover only meters per day on distant worlds. Fully autonomous, vision-guided AI navigation system operating locally on edge hardware is needed.

As young generations move to cities, historic mountain farming terraces are abandoned, leading to unchecked soil erosion and landslides.

Mental health conditions often go undiagnosed simply because they're never screened for during regular medical visits, especially in areas with limited specialist access. Making mental health screening as routine as blood pressure checks remains an unmet global health goal.

When the people appointing or removing judges are the same people those judges might need to rule against, fair trials involving powerful officials become far less likely. This weakens the separation of powers meant to keep governments in check.

Even advanced AI systems sometimes generate plausible-sounding but incorrect answers, and users often can't tell the difference without checking elsewhere. A dependable way to prevent this remains unsolved.

If P equaled NP, countless hard problems in logistics, cryptography, and optimization could be solved efficiently, but most computer scientists suspect they can't. This remains the most famous open question in computer science.

Primes appear scattered with no obvious repeating pattern, and finding a true predictive formula, rather than just an approximation, remains unsolved. This is closely tied to the deeper mysteries of the Riemann Hypothesis.

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.

Certain classes of expressions can be checked for equivalence efficiently, but a fully general and guaranteed method covering every possible mathematical expression remains unresolved. This unresolved question has real consequences for automated theorem proving and symbolic computation.

Known as Goldbach's Conjecture, this simple-sounding statement has been checked for enormous numbers without exception, but never formally proven true for all numbers. It remains one of the oldest unsolved problems in mathematics.

Known as the P versus NP problem, this asks whether problems whose solutions are easy to verify are also easy to find in the first place. Answering it would reshape computer science, cryptography, and optimization overnight.

Economic and political power increasingly concentrates in fewer hands, while regulation struggles to keep pace with how quickly this happens. Left unchecked, this threatens both economic fairness and democratic balance.