Infinite problems. Infinite solutions.
A live map for people with a moral mission — every company, founder, and economy pointed at 16 ranked problems worth your life. Find the good quest you are unusually positioned to carry, then start building.
Where demand is high, and supply is low.
Every problem ranked by opportunity: how badly the world needs a solution, divided by how well-served it already is. The biggest gaps are step zero.
opportunity = demand (humans affected × severity × market) divided by supply (companies, capital, and solution quality already on it), nudged by urgency. Higher = a bigger, more urgent, less-served gap. The ● dots show how many independent demand signals (burden, willingness-to-pay, capital, research, policy, expert priors, queues & shortages) corroborate the number — more dots = more credible. allocation compares each problem’s share of real capital ($/yr, sourced estimates) to its share of demand: under half its fair share = underallocated, over double = overallocated. Arrows = 3-year capital momentum. Full method on the methodology page.
| # | problem | tier | co | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Prevent engineered and naturally-emerging pandemics from wiping out humanity or crippling civilization. | x-risk frontier | 8.1B | · | 9.0 | 80% | 12y | $500.0B | 4 | 2 |
| 02 | The largest controllable mortality risk is a primary-care delivery failure, not a missing drug. | welfare floor | 1.4B | · | · | 77% | 5y | · | 0 | 0 |
| 03 | The AI compute buildout is no longer chip-constrained. It is power-constrained, and the gap is $1.3 trillion. | hard tech | 8.2B | · | · | 30% | 12y | $1.3T | 0 | 0 |
| 04 | 1.7 billion people need treatment for diseases that get under 2% of pharmaceutical R&D and falling aid. | welfare floor | 1.7B | · | · | · | 10y | · | 0 | 0 |
| 05 | Close the gap between what materials cost and what buildings cost, housing is 5× its bill of materials. | hard tech | 1.6B | 8.0× | · | 20% | 15y | $2.0T | 5 | 3 |
| 06 | Lift the ~700 million people living on less than $2.15 a day into stable prosperity. | welfare floor | 700.0M | 30.0× | · | 40% | · | · | 0 | 0 |
| 07 | The US Surgeon General called it an epidemic. Mortality effect equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. | emerging | 1.5B | 5.0× | · | 25% | 20y | $50.0B | 4 | 0 |
| 08 | 2.3 million babies die in their first month of life every year, mostly from causes medicine already knows how to prevent. | welfare floor | 2.3M | 78.0× | · | · | 5y | · | 0 | 0 |
| 09 | The Copenhagen Consensus welfare floor, pennies save lives, and we still are not spending them. | welfare floor | 2.5B | 48.0× | · | 50% | 10y | $150.0B | 5 | 0 |
| 10 | Close Bloom's 2-sigma gap, every child deserves a personal tutor, and AI may finally make it tractable. | progress & abundance | 1.5B | 12.0× | · | 30% | 12y | $200.0B | 5 | 4 |
| 11 | Decarbonize the global economy fast enough to limit warming, while keeping energy cheap and abundant. | welfare floor | 8.2B | 10.0× | · | 50% | · | · | 0 | 0 |
| 12 | Every developed country is below replacement. Under-counted by EA and e/acc. Civilizationally large. | emerging | 6.0B | · | 5.5 | 15% | 30y | $1.0T | 4 | 2 |
| 13 | Extend healthspan. Aging is the single largest driver of disease burden, and it is treatable. | hard tech | 8.1B | 7.0× | · | 40% | 25y | $300.0B | 8 | 3 |
| 14 | Move value for everyone at near-zero cost, on rails not owned by a sixty-year-old duopoly. | progress & abundance | 1.3B | · | · | 35% | 5y | $1.0B | 0 | 0 |
| 15 | Ideas are getting harder to find. Reverse the decline in research productivity per dollar. | progress & abundance | 8.1B | 20.0× | 6.5 | 35% | 20y | $100.0B | 9 | 5 |
| 16 | Produce clean, cheap, dispatchable energy at civilizational scale, fusion, advanced fission, geothermal. | hard tech | 8.1B | 15.0× | 7.0 | 25% | 25y | $5.0T | 34 | 3 |
The pipeline.
On optimism.fun, each ranked problem has thinkers explaining it, companies attacking it, and a coordination layer of talent and capital pointed at it. Every node is sourced.
Every problem above, solved for all that have it.
Extreme poverty cut by more than half since 1990. Child mortality down ~60%. Literacy near-universal. Life expectancy up two decades. This is the world on the other side of the table — and the receipts are getting longer.
See the receipts →The market has already started pricing the solutions.
The world’s largest companies are already worth more than $100T combined — and most of that valuation traces back to a single quest: someone picked a hard problem and shipped a solution at scale. The leaderboard above ranks where the next dollar should go.
GDP growth has no physical ceiling — only a willingness ceiling. As long as we keep picking good problems and solving them, the curve compounds. Some quests are power-law: aligned AI, cheap fusion, disease eradication. Hit one and the whole table shifts up.
One problem.One whitepaper. Every week.
Each week we ship a deep-dive whitepaper on a top-ranked humanity-scale problem — built in the spirit of Musk’s Hyperloop Alpha and the transformer paper. Problem + market size + before/after vision + a proposed solution + the investors who would back it. Humanity’s Requests for Startups, sourced and sorted quantitatively. No spam. No marketing.
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