A public debate on CERN's Future Circular Collider project, the FCC, is currently underway in France and Switzerland. In France, this is a legally mandated process for any major infrastructure with potential territorial impact, and it will run until autumn 2026. In the local area, particularly in Haute-Savoie, there are pockets of resistance to the project that make the conversation difficult. Not because no one has the right to question its rationale, costs, and consequences, but because the debate is often so polarised that it seems driven more by diffuse anxiety than by concrete concerns about the project itself. One positive outcome of the process is that CERN has produced a detailed document (and a summary) with the numbers we can put today on the FCC's costs and impact. Any serious discussion should start from there, and put those numbers in perspective.
As part of this initiative, CERN recently hosted a lecture by Étienne Klein: physicist, essayist, director of the Laboratory for Research on the Sciences of Matter at CEA, and one of the most lucid voices in France at the boundary between physics and philosophy. The evening was aimed at local elected officials and institutional stakeholders, but open by registration to anyone who wanted to attend. Towards the end, Klein mentioned something I hadn't known, and that struck me deeply: today, one third of humanity cannot see the Milky Way, and often never has. Light pollution has erased it from the sky of one person in three.
Klein built a deeper parallel from that fact. Not seeing the immensity of the cosmos leads us to fold inward, as if the only world that matters were the one immediately surrounding us, with no stellar distances to inspire us. And this folding inward is not just spatial; it is temporal too. Klein recalled how, as a teenager in the 1970s, the year 2000 was on everyone's lips: by 2000 we'll do this, that will happen, we'll build such a society. Who today allows themselves to dream of the world of 2050? The problems we seem intent on concentrating on, real and pressing as they are, are exclusively problems of the present. The future, in our heads or in our gut, seems either nonexistent or condemned by wars, economic crises, climate change, pandemics. It is not worth imagining 2050, because deep down we don't believe it will exist. And so thinking about a project like the FCC, which if all goes well might perhaps see the light on that timescale, seems impossible, or simply inadequate to the urgency of a today that devours everything.
A few years ago I did the circuit of Monviso with family and friends. One of the nights we stayed at the Refuge de Viso, on the French side of the mountain: a refuge that, from a certain hour, turns off every light on the premises. In a valley with no other light sources, the Milky Way appears in its full majesty. For the four teenagers and two children walking with us, it was the first time, the first chance to see with their own eyes the immensity of a cosmos that from the streets of Turin or Geneva they had never managed to glimpse. I remember with emotion their wonder and my own. I have been lucky enough to see the Milky Way many times, and yet it moves me every time. The world we live in is far from perfect, and much of what happens or looms ahead is frightening, capable of freezing us like rabbits on a motorway, blinded by the headlights of an oncoming lorry. But there is a time beyond the present, and a space beyond our own navel, to be seen, thought about, hoped for.
(this post is the English translation of this one)
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