[DexesTTP]

LIGO by itself serves "very little" purpose, just watching for gravitational events that are theoretically possible and checking if they happen for real. It actually confirmed that these events exist a while ago[1], and now it's "just" looking for more things we already know exist.

in my opinion, the point of LIGO is no longer in detecting these gravitational events anymore tbh. Doing that is cool, and will bring us more data points about the events, but it's unlikely to ever yield "new science" like that.

Instead, LIGO (and Virgo) excel in exactly the kind of thing that we see in this article: to push the barrier of what we can do in this hyperspecific use-case, finding ways to do "new" engineering that would not make sense for other commercial projects yet and finding out how to implement cool solutions. The fairly consequent amount of funding and the extra focused goal it is aiming for will lead to new techniques and technologies that might have an impact.

Now, is there a guarantee that this new technology will have a larger impact than "better detectors"? No. Actually, there's no guarantee about anything coming out of LIGO ever, no more than out of the LHC[2] or ITER[3] or the ELT[4] will give us new science. But putting all of your eggs in the same basket is a bad solution for making more science, and there's enough room in science budgets to try a few dozen monumental projects and see what sticks.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_observation_of_gravitati...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_Large_Telescope

[badcppdev]

There is a chance that LIGO will detect something we don't expect. I believe that has happened quite a bit with optical microscopes and telescopes.

Edit: Actually you said that but consider it unlikely which I absolutely can't argue with.

[hereme888]

thank you