  The cosmological constant problem can be understood as the failure of the
decoupling principle behind effective field theory, so that some quantities in
the low-energy theory are extremely sensitive to the high-energy properties.
While this reflects the genuine character of the cosmological constant, finding
an adequate effective field theory framework which avoids this naturalness
problem may represent a step forward to understand nature. Following this
intuition, we consider a minimal modification of the structure of general
relativity which as an effective theory permits to work consistently at low
energies, i.e., below the quantum gravity scale. This effective description
preserves the classical phenomenology of general relativity and the particle
spectrum of the standard model, at the price of changing our conceptual and
mathematical picture of spacetime.
