Switzerland Today
Dear Swiss Abroad,
Human beings have set off for the Moon for the first time in over 50 years, on a mission that includes a small Swiss contribution.
Fun fact: the share of the Swiss population that vividly remembers the last lunar expedition in 1972 is larger than the part that has never had to use a paper telephone directory.
I wish you a pleasant Easter season and, of course, good reading!
For the first time, Switzerland’s permanent resident population aged over 65 has outnumbered those under 20.
To be precise, the older segment of the population numbers 1,811,000, compared to 1,802,000 for the younger segment, the Federal Statistical Office reports. Both represent about 20% of the total resident population. The figures refer to the end of 2025, when 9,124,300 people resided in Switzerland, 73,300 more than a year earlier, an increase of 0.8%.
The number of births continues to fall, but less sharply (-0.5% in 2025, -2.2% in 2024), with 77,900 births and an average of 1.28 children per woman. Mortality, on the other hand, remains stable, with 71,700 deaths last year.
Life expectancy at birth increased by 0.4 years for women and 0.3 years for men, reaching 86.3 years for women and 82.7 years for men in 2025, writes the FSO.
At 12:35am Swiss time, over half a century since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, humans set off today to the Moon. The Artemis II mission will take its crew 370,000 kilometres from Earth around the moon on a lunar flyby and back again. This feat is possible, in part, thanks to Swiss technology.
Artemis II is seen as an important step towards a real Moon landing, planned with the future Artemis IV mission. In particular, Artemis II is due to test NASA’s Orion spacecraft and the European Service Module (ESM). The latter contains fundamental propulsion, energy, temperature control and life-support systems for Orion.
Swiss companies have made several important contributions to the ESM. “The company Beyond Gravity developed and built the mechanics, and the company Thales Alenia Space Schweiz built the electronics of the propulsion motors that control the four solar panels,” Martin Fischer, spokesperson for the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI), explained to the Tages-Anzeiger.
The advent of so-called LLMs (large language models), and applications like ChatGPT or Google Gemini, has popularised artificial intelligence (AI), and Switzerland is no exception. In the Alpine country, 76% of people have already used such tools, according to a survey by Comparis.
This percentage has been rising steeply. In 2024 it stood at just under 50%, then rose to 62.4% in 2025. Certain segments of the population seem much more inclined to take advantage of AI. The percentage of users reaches 90.1% among those aged 18 to 35, 81.6% for those aged 36 to 55, and 52.1% for those 56 or older.
Daily use of LLMs at work to summarise or draft texts, stands at 31.4%, up from 26.6% in 2025.
Demonstrating how far these extremely powerful tools have entered everyday habits is an interesting statistic for tolerance. Some 62.9% of respondents said they accept fewer errors from an LLM than from a human interlocutor.
Defence Minister Martin Pfister has indicated that the federal government might not purchase the Patriot air-defence system from the United States. Due to delays in delivery, payments had already been stopped in the autumn.
This latest pressure measure proved ineffective because Washington diverted the funds the federal government paid for F-35 jets to the Patriot project, Swiss public broadcaster SRF revealed last week.
“A waiver is always an option in the event of a delay,” Pfister said. “We still assume that the delivery will take place, but we don’t know when.” The freeze on disbursements for the ground-to-air defence system remains in place, while those for the F-35 continue, the defence ministry announced.
“It is crucial for Switzerland’s security and defence that […] the procurement of the F-35A is not compromised by decisions on the Patriot system,” the defence ministry wrote.
Washington has announced that it will inform Switzerland in the coming weeks about the status of the operations, the delivery schedule, the costs and the consequences of a possible interruption, the defence ministry added. A recommendation on this dossier will be submitted to the Swiss federal government “by the end of June 2026”.
Translated using AI/amva
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