  The discovery of the Higgs boson by the LHC and the measurement of its mass
at around 125 GeV, taken together with the absence of signals of physics beyond
the standard model, make it possible that we might live in a metastable
electroweak vacuum. Intriguingly, we seem to be very close to the boundary of
stability and this near-criticality makes our vacuum extremely long-lived. In
this talk I describe the state-of-the-art calculation leading to these results,
explaining what are the ingredients and assumptions that enter in it, with
special emphasis on the role of the top mass. I also discuss possible
implications of this metastability for physics beyond the standard model and
comment on the possible impact of physics at the Planck scale on
near-criticality.
