  Even if nothing but a light Higgs is observed at the LHC, suggesting that the
Standard Model is unmodified up to scales far above the weak scale, Higgs
physics can yield surprises of fundamental significance for cosmology. As has
long been known, the Standard Model vacuum may be metastable for low enough
Higgs mass, but a specific value of the decay rate holds special significance:
for a very narrow window of parameters, our Universe has not yet decayed but
the current inflationary period can not be future eternal. Determining whether
we are in this window requires exquisite but achievable experimental precision,
with a measurement of the Higgs mass to 0.1 GeV at the LHC, the top mass to 60
MeV at a linear collider, as well as an improved determination of alpha_s by an
order of magnitude on the lattice. If the parameters are observed to lie in
this special range, particle physics will establish that the future of our
Universe is a global big crunch, without harboring pockets of eternal
inflation, strongly suggesting that eternal inflation is censored by the
fundamental theory. This conclusion could be drawn even more sharply if
metastability with the appropriate decay rate is found in the MSSM, where the
physics governing the instability can be directly probed at the TeV scale.
