[ExI] Surprise! Our Bodies Have Been Hiding a Trojan Horse for Gene Therapy

William Flynn Wallace foozler83 at gmail.com
Wed Aug 25 16:02:22 UTC 2021


Spike, how many failures of the equipment needed to build that happened on
the way to the success of LIGO?  Just put together from known tech, or
what?   bill w

On Wed, Aug 25, 2021 at 9:38 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

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> *…*> *On Behalf Of *William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat
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> >…How many scientific discoveries occurred the very first time something
> was tried?  I'd say probably none.  Every success rests atop a mountain of
> failures.   bill w
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> I can only think of one, but that one was truly great: LIGO, the black
> hole merger detector.
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> That one was an important object lesson to me.  It is a rare example of an
> experiment which has no viable downscale test experiments.  With the
> detector technology we have, the tube would need to be as long as it is (4
> km) so you can’t really build a mini-LIGO with 4-meter tubes.  The first
> attempt to detect gravity waves would need to cost a ton of money, which My
> understanding at the time of the Big Bang was that we would have a black
> hole merger about once a century on average.  I thought at the time would
> be a waste: we would turn it on, wait for a signal for perhaps a century,
> never see one, they eventually turn it off.  Or we would see one, argue for
> another century on what that was, never see another one, like the legendary
> WOW signal from SETI.
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> But that isn’t what happened at all.  They spent a ton of money, built the
> thing, turned it on for what was intended as mostly a calibration run in
> 2015, three weeks later BWIP.  I do confess I didn’t believe it was the
> real thing: just too coincidental.  I was there when they pulled the cover
> off that astonishing BWIP at the Stanford linear accelerator in Feb 2016.
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> Now we are getting several events a year, and some of them are being dug
> out of the data and interpreted after the fact.  I missed my estimate of
> how often these events occur by a cool three orders of magnitude.  As far
> as I know, not one scientist or astronomer predicted we would be getting
> such a vast treasure chest of events from that instrument.  The most
> optimistic guessed an event every few years.
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> LIGO is a rare example of a scientific discovery of huge importance that
> worked beyond everyone’s imagination on the first try.
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> spike
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