humanity’s requests for startups · v0.1
Infinite problems. Infinite solutions.
10 priority problems, ranked. Every number sourced. Pick one worth your life.
weighting: equal weight, all lenses
| # | problem | tier | co | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | AI safety & alignment 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 | Biosecurity & pandemic preparedness 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 | Infectious disease (malaria, TB, HIV) 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 |
| 04 | Scientific productivity 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 |
| 05 | Energy abundance 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 |
| 06 | Fertility decline & demographic stagnation 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 |
| 07 | Pedagogy at scale 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 | Longevity & aging 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 |
| 09 | Low-cost housing & construction 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 |
| 10 | Loneliness & social isolation 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 |
hover any column header for definitions, or read the full 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.