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On the precipice of new physics, scientists are keen to make use of the LHC's new upgrades to investigate the Higgs boson, explore dark matter and potentially expand our understanding of the standard model, the leading theory describing all known fundamental forces and elementary particles in the universe. First introduced during the late 1960s and early 1970s, supersymmetry looked promising due to its mathematical elegance and its ability to explain why gravity appears to be much weaker than the other fundamental forces and to resolve other mysteries such as dark matter. Aaij, Roel, et al. " Test of lepton universality in beauty-quark decays." arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.11769 (2021). But the Standard Model is not the be-all and end-all of physics. It falls short in providing explanations for mysteries such as the existence of dark matter or dark energy, or why gravity is so different from other fundamental forces.

Cutting-edge science is an exploration of the unknown; an intellectual step into the frontier of human knowledge. Such studies provide great excitement for those of us passionate about understanding the world around us, but some are apprehensive of the unknown and wonder if new and powerful science, and the facilities where it is explored, could be dangerous. Some even go so far as to ask whether one of humanity's most ambitious research projects could even pose an existential threat to the Earth itself. So let's ask that question now and get it out of the way. Can a supercollider end life on Earth? No. Of course not.

Now one must be careful. It's easy to throw numbers around a bit glibly. While there are lots of cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere with LHC energies, the situations between what happens inside the LHC and what happens with cosmic rays everywhere on Earth are a bit different. Over 12 years after it entered service, the LHC is still the world's biggest and most powerful particle accelerator. But it won't hold that record forever. Several countries have plans to go a step further, including China's Circular Electron Positron Collider and the International Linear Collider in Japan.

In their conceptual design report, CERN listed three possible avenues for their Future Circular Collider to take, each providing a different set of advantages and disadvantages in science, engineering and cost. The first is the construction of an electron-positron collider (FCC-ee) 100 km around that will provide high-precision studies of the Higgs boson and other known particles. The second would upgrade the FCC-ee into a new hadron collider (FCC-hh) with an energy seven times that of the LHC. This design could include a hadron-lepton interaction point (FCC-he). And finally, perhaps at the bottom of the wish list, is an upgrade to the LHC (HE-LHC) that will double its current power to 27,000 GeV. Inside Science) -- In 2012, particle physicists detected the long-sought-after Higgs boson for the first time. This particle was the last missing puzzle piece of what physicists call the Standard Model -- the most thoroughly tested set of physical laws that govern our universe. The Higgs discovery was made possible by a giant machine in Europe, known as the Large Hadron Collider that uses a 27-kilometer ring of superconducting magnets to accelerate and then smash particles together at near the speed of light.

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The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) pictured here can capture images of particles up to 40 million times per second. (Image credit: xenotar via Getty Images)