Antimatter often pops into existence inside CERN’s high-energy accelerators, as one-half of a particle-antiparticle pair. But in the usual course of events, the antiparticles don’t last long before they’re annihilated in collisions with ordinary particles. Cosmic rays of that energy are rarer than the lower energy ones, but still 500,000,000 of them hit the Earth's atmosphere every year.

Tian Yu Cao, a philosopher of science and politics from Boston University, is pessimistic about the future of China's Circular Electron Positron Collider, or CEPC. He pointed to China’s last Five-Year Plan published in 2016, which did not mention the CEPC among the 10 flagship projects announced in the report.

Sirunyan, A. M., et al. " Evidence for X (3872) in Pb-Pb Collisions and Studies of its Prompt Production at s N N= 5.02 TeV." Physical Review Letters 128.3 (2022): 032001. LHC Safety Assessment Group " Review of the Safety of LHC Collisions Addendum on strangelets". June 2008. The LHC's biggest moment came in 2012 with the discovery of the Higgs boson. Although widely referred to as the "God particle", it's not really as awesome in itself as that name might suggest. Its huge significance came from the fact that it was the last prediction of the Standard Model that hadn't yet been proven. But the Higgs boson is far from being the LHC's only discovery. What immediately follows are the weaker (but still compelling) reasons why this possibility is, well, not possible, and in the next section you will see the cast-iron and gold-plated reasons to dismiss this and all other possible Earth-ending scenarios.

Sharing the same underground cavern as LHCb is a smaller instrument called MoEDAL, which stands for "Monopole and Exotics Detector at the LHC". While most CERN experiments are designed to study known particles, this one is aimed at discovering hitherto unknown ones that lie outside the present Standard Model. A monopole, for example, would be a magnetized particle consisting only of a north pole without a south one, or vice versa. Such particles have long been hypothesized, but never observed. With LHC's magnets "trained" and the proton beams more powerful than ever, the LHC will be able to create collisions at higher energies than ever before, expanding the possibilities for what scientists using the upgraded equipment might find. The LHC is sometimes referred to as “high energy” physics but it’s only high energy on a subatomic level. (Image credit: mesut zengin via Getty Images) Two of the four collision points around the circumference of the LHC are occupied by large general-purpose detectors. These include the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), which can be thought of as a giant 3D camera, snapping images of particles up to 40 million times per second. And, occasionally, that inconvenient bit of matter is the Earth. We call these intergalactic bullets — mostly high-energy protons — "cosmic rays." Cosmic rays carry a range of energies, from the almost negligible, to energies that absolutely dwarf those of the LHC.In 2012, the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences announced a plan to build the next great supercollider. The planned Circular Electron Positron Collider will be 100 kilometers around, almost four times larger than the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC. Then in 2013, the LHC's operator, known as CERN, also announced their plan for a new collider, named simply the Future Circular Collider.