LIGO detects most massive black hole merger to date

I'm in dire need of good news, so help me see it in an optimistic lens: can you imagine a path (even very indirect) where this kind of discovery ends up having a practical use that makes real life better here on Earth ?

(I'm not in the age-old debate about "is research useful ?" - I agree the answer is yes ; I just have a failure of imagination that prevents me from answer the question "how is this research going to be useful in the long run ?")

Just an amateur interested person here, but I think there is something very positive about these developments. There are probably more, that experts can chime in on, but one I know about is that gravitational waves can give us a signal of what happened when the universe came into existence. The cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) is a similar thing with photons - it is a signal from the earliest photons to be emitted after the Big Bang / inflation. But the universe was opaque to photons for the first 300000 or so years. Even so cosmological theories have been confirmed and falsified based on this data. But gravitational waves are signals that originated right from the start, and are not blocked by anything unlike photons, and so likely give us much clearer information on the state of the universe when it was created. This might make new insights in fundamental physics possible (quantum mechanics, relativity).

This overlaps with the fascinating topic of multi-messenger astronomy: observing an event using photons, neutrinos, and now: gravitational waves, leading to triple-messenger astronomy, leading to (hand waves) more insights than.. otherwise.

How this might make real life better ln earth: that is a gamble, but progress in fundamental physics has frequently made life better on earth.

I wish you All the best in feeling better about the world.

>practical< usefulness of this type of research isn't results per se - but methods of getting to them

LIGO needs extremely precise lasers, stationary platforms, extreme positioning precision, tons of supporting software - even if things "exist", the _need_ for results provide advances and improvements

astronomy itself already gave us cmos sensors (aka digital cameras) - but using your phone camera doesn't really make you think "this is caused by distance measurement to the stars"

Most rich civilization, to show off how great they are, have built monuments. Basically saying, look we are so rich we can redirect a big part of our society's productivity to building a magnificent piece of art. Notice, how the ancient Egyptians are remembered thousands of years later.

You should think of some research in similar ways. This is us saying, look how rich and powerful we are, we can devote a significant part of our society's productivity on discovering the very essence of this universe with no practical benefit to us. Detecting blackhole mergers is an intellectual monument.

> but using your phone camera doesn't really make you think "this is caused by distance measurement to the stars"

Maybe it should!

There's so many technologies that we use today that derive from astronomy, space exploration and similar. We don't do a good job making that point to folks.

> "how is this research going to be useful in the long run ?"

We don't know.

However, black holes are close to the limit of our scientific knowledge. We don't know what happens on the other side of an event horizon (and we may never know, at least not experimentally). Learning more about them means learning more about the universe, and every once in a while we make a breakthrough that leapfrogs our technology. There's nothing else that we can do with so much potential.

Most of the time though, the progress is quite 'boring', at least if you are not in a related field.

Well, maybe it's because in the last two to three decades, for the layman, technology has been mostly delivering funny gadgets, small incremental improvements, and massive problems.

We still need fusion reactors, flying cars, telepathy and a cure for cancer yesteryear.

Instead we had 140 characters, PFAS in everything (which make the cure for cancer even more overdue) ; cars that got very much not flying but very bigger (and made the world hotter, and the fusion even more overdue) ; smartphone that makes spreading lies faster than even telepathy could ever do, etc...

But, now, sure, our flying drones are guided with "A", so the authoritarian régimes only have to point in a vague direction to get innocent people bombed.

No wonder "Yay, science" is getting a hard rep.

Thank the FSM you Americans decided to stop doing science altogether. Maybe the world needs to see that "bad research" is worse than "no research at all".

Last time we did that in Europe, it only lasted for 1000 years, and got us cool looking castles and dramatic paintings. So, art, I guess ?