humanity’s requests for startups · v0.1
Infinite problems. Infinite solutions.
A live map of capitalism — every company, founder, and economy — pointed at 12 ranked problems worth your life. Spin the globe, then start your quest.
The radar
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.
Ensure increasingly capable AI systems remain corrigible, honest, and aligned with human values.
6 cos · 4 funds on it · $600M/yr ↗ · $3T prize
Prevent engineered and naturally-emerging pandemics from wiping out humanity or crippling civilization.
4 cos · 3 funds on it · $4B/yr ↘ · $200B prize
Lift the ~700 million people living on less than $2.15 a day into stable prosperity.
0 cos · 0 funds on it · $212B/yr ↘ · $500B prize
The Copenhagen Consensus welfare floor, pennies save lives, and we still are not spending them.
5 cos · 3 funds on it · $25B/yr ↘ · $200B prize
Close the gap between what materials cost and what buildings cost, housing is 5× its bill of materials.
5 cos · 5 funds on it · $10B/yr ↘ · $300B prize
The US Surgeon General called it an epidemic. Mortality effect equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
4 cos · 1 funds on it · $300M/yr → · $200B prize
Extend healthspan. Aging is the single largest driver of disease burden, and it is treatable.
8 cos · 5 funds on it · $8B/yr → · $3T prize
Decarbonize the global economy fast enough to limit warming, while keeping energy cheap and abundant.
0 cos · 0 funds on it · $1.5T/yr ↗ · $1T prize
Close Bloom's 2-sigma gap, every child deserves a personal tutor, and AI may finally make it tractable.
5 cos · 3 funds on it · $3B/yr ↘ · $300B prize
Every developed country is below replacement. Under-counted by EA and e/acc. Civilizationally large.
4 cos · 1 funds on it · $1B/yr → · $200B prize
Ideas are getting harder to find. Reverse the decline in research productivity per dollar.
9 cos · 8 funds on it · $400M/yr ↗ · $1T prize
Produce clean, cheap, dispatchable energy at civilizational scale, fusion, advanced fission, geothermal.
34 cos · 12 funds on it · $2.2T/yr ↗ · $2T prize
opportunity = demand (humans affected × severity × market) divided by supply (companies, capital, and solution quality already on it), nudged by urgency. Higher = a bigger, more urgent, less-served gap. The ● dots show how many independent demand signals (burden, willingness-to-pay, capital, research, policy, expert priors) corroborate the number — more dots = more credible. allocation compares each problem’s share of real capital ($/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.
matched
12 / 12
humans affected
62.5B
lens
balanced
sorted by
priority ▾
weighting: equal weight, all lenses
| # | problem | tier | co | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Ensure increasingly capable AI systems remain corrigible, honest, and aligned with human values. | x-risk frontier | 8.1B | · | 9.5 | 90% | 15y | $200.0B | 6 | 4 |
| 02 | 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 |
| 03 | 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 |
| 04 | 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 |
| 05 | 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 |
| 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 | 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 |
| 08 | 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 |
| 09 | 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 |
| 10 | Decarbonize the global economy fast enough to limit warming, while keeping energy cheap and abundant. | welfare floor | 8.2B | 10.0× | · | 50% | · | · | 0 | 0 |
| 11 | 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 |
| 12 | 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 |
● confidence dot on humans — high, med, low. full method in methodology.
The pipeline.
Each problem above has thinkers explaining it, companies attacking it, and a coordination layer of talent and capital pointed at it. Every node sourced.
04 · coordination
05 · the white mirror
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 →06 · already happening
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.
Weekly whitepaper drop
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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the three routings
1 · weekly whitepaper
one humanity-scale problem per week, deep-dived to whitepaper depth. ships every monday.
2 · founder → problem match
if you’re building, we’ll route you toward the problem and capital stack you fit.
3 · allocator → deal flow
if you’re deploying capital, curated quest-mapped deal flow in the domains you care about.