That's a very good question, but unfortunately the answer seems to be *forever*, because, as in most things these days, our vote doesn't seem to matter. They want our money (because that buys the good life for them and has for 50+ years) and they have found they can use the government to take it from us, while a friendly media spin out excuses and rationalizations for their taking it. So every year (it's been 4 years since that was written) brings new, even more costly experiments ... like SABRE in Australia ... and a blitz of snazzy media productions to justify them containing even more tortured logic ... like that below ...28.09.2018
What if everything we know about dark matter is totally wrong?
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Despite huge pots of money being poured since the 1970s into dark matter experiments on, under or above Earth, despite endless late nights spent doing calculations, and despite plenty of media coverage, researchers keep getting nowhere. Apart from SNOLAB, there is the LUX experiment in Lead, South Dakota, one mile underground in an abandoned gold mine. It has obtained zero results. In France, the EDELWEISS experiment in a lab under the French Alps, under 1.7 km of rock, has found nothing. The PandaX experiment in the Jin-Ping sub-terrain laboratory in China hasn't spotted any particles either. In India, Jaduguda Underground Science Laboratory opened last year, 550 meters below the surface at an operating uranium mine. So far, they have found nothing (well, they've only been looking for a year). And on, and on, and on.
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So just how much longer can researchers justify that they are looking for something unknown and finding nothing, but still get away with asking for more money to look for nothing... just a little bit longer?
In my opinion ... that's UTTER GARBAGE. This would be funny if these jokers hadn't wasted BILLIONS of taxpayer dollars with plans to waste perhaps billions more. The truth is that you could make the exact same argument about setting limits on the existence of ... well ... unicorns ... to justify spending billions in a search for them. And the irony is that finding unicorns would probably benefit humanity more than finding dark matter will, because these people haven't even come up with a way to benefit humanity after spending billions of dollars to find the Higgs Boson a decade ago.Well, turns out that for the researchers who have devoted their whole life to dark matter, null results are ultra-important – nearly as important as finding something.
“The only difference is that if you find dark matter, you get a Nobel Prize, but the importance in setting the limits [where there is no dark matter] is just the same,” says physicist Walter Fulgione from Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) in Italy.
For the most part, the only thing that particle research is good for these days is perhaps building better bombs ... and we sure need better bombs, don't we? Better bombs in the hands of the greedy, insane people running government after government. And meanwhile ... a true understanding of even our locale environment languishes because of lack of resources and mainstream science's (if we dare call it science any more) blinders about the importance of electricity and plasma, for instance. And unfortunately time seems to be running out for our civilization before we return to rocks and sticks.