[cryptonector]

Right, there is a reason to build ever-larger colliders. The question is: is it worth the cost? And, really, what's the opportunity cost? If a new collider costs ten times what experiments like Hyper-Kamiokande cost, if building a new collider would crowd out the smaller experiments, then maybe it's not worth it.

But before we had better reasons to want to build larger colliders: to observe more of the SM particle zoo. Utimately it was to observe the Higss boson. If the SM has run out of predictions we can only test with bigger colliders, and the only reason left to build bigger colliers is to test SM more finely, or to hope for a break in the SM, well, these reasons aren't quite as compelling. I think this is TFA's author's argument, and I don't think it's wrong.

We might still decide to build a bigger collider, but we should admit that the arguments for it are not that compelling.