During his SpaceX Starship Update for 2024, Elon Musk argued that we might be alone in the universe because he had not yet noticed signs of aliens. This immediately raised a question from the history of physics:
In 2010, would Elon be justified in arguing that he did not notice signs of the Higgs boson and hence this theorized particle might not exist?
The actual discovery of the Higgs in 2012 required CERN’s Large Hadron Collider to smash ions at unprecedented energies at a cost of ten billion dollars.