LIGO: Absurdity of Big Physics

The Advanced LIGO Project has now been launched as the largest single experiment ever funded by NSF at $0.365 billion:

• The LIGO scientific and engineering team at Caltech and MIT has been leading the effort over the past seven years to build Advanced LIGO, the world's most sensitive gravitational-wave detector.
• Gravitational waves were predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916 as a consequence of his general theory of relativity, and are emitted by violent events in the universe such as exploding stars and colliding black holes. 
• Experimental attempts to find gravitational waves have been on going for over 50 years, and they haven't yet been found. They're both very rare and possess signal amplitudes that are exquisitely tiny.
• Although earlier LIGO runs revealed no detections, Advanced LIGO, also funded by the NSF, increases the sensitivity of the observatories by a factor of 10, resulting in a thousandfold increase in observable candidate objects. 
• The original configuration of LIGO was sensitive enough to detect a change in the lengths of the 4-kilometer arms by a distance one-thousandth the diameter of a proton; this is like accurately measuring the distance from Earth to the nearest star—over four light-years—to within the width of a human hair. 
• Advanced LIGO, which will utilize the infrastructure of LIGO, is much more powerful.
• The improved instruments will be able to look at the last minutes of the life of pairs of massive black holes as they spiral closer together, coalesce into one larger black hole, and then vibrate much like two soap bubbles becoming one. 
• In addition, Advanced LIGO will be used to search for the gravitational cosmic background, allowing tests of theories about the development of the universe only $10^{-35}$ seconds after the Big Bang.

Read these numbers: The accuracy of old LIGO was  

• the diameter of a human hair over a distance of 4 light-years, 
• $10^{-35}$ seconds after Big Bang,

and yet not the slightest little gravitational wave signal was recorded from even the most violent large scale phenomena thinkable. The conclusion should be clear: There are no gravitational waves. After all, why should there be any? By Einstein's general relativity which nobody claims to grasp?

But this is not the way Big Physics works: The fact that nothing was found by the infinitely sensitive LIGO requires an even more infinitely sensitive Advanced LIGO at a cost of a half a billion to be built by eager physicists, and after Advanced LIGO has found nothing, funding for an Advanced Advanced LIGO will be requested and so on...but why are tax payers supplying this Big Money?