  The possibility that supersymmetry (SUSY) could be broken in a metastable
vacuum has recently attracted renewed interest. In these proceedings we will
argue that metastability is an attractive and testable scenario. The recent
developments were triggered by the presentation of a simple and calculable
model of metastable SUSY breaking by Intriligator, Seiberg and Shih (ISS),
which we will briefly review. One of the main questions raised by metastability
is, why did the universe end up in this vacuum. Using the ISS model as an
example we will argue that in a large class of models the universe is
automatically driven into the metastable state during the early hot phase and
gets trapped there. This makes metastability a natural option from the
cosmological point of view. However, it may be more than that. The
phenomenologically required gaugino masses require the breaking of R-symmetry.
However, in scenarios with a low supersymmetry breaking scale, e.g., gauge
mediation a powerful theorem due to Nelson and Seiberg places this at odds with
supersymmetry breaking in a truely stable state and metstability becomes
(nearly) inevitable. Turning around one can now experimentally test whether
gauge mediation is realised in nature thereby automatically testing the
possibility of a metastability of the vacuum. Indeed, already the LHC may give
us crucial information about the stability of the vacuum.
