The wily colonial boy

We review here the prospects of a long-term upgrade programme for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), CERN laboratory's new proton–proton collider. The super-LHC, which is currently under evaluation and design, is expected to deliver of the order of ten times the statistics of the LHC. In addition to a non-technical summary of the principal physics arguments for the upgrade, I present a pedagogical introduction to the technological challenges on the accelerator and experimental fronts, and a review of the current status of the planning.