June 6: Pseudoscience

 Pseudoscience

Today's blog is about a very interesting subject that many people have not thought about before: pseudoscience. 
What is pseudoscience you may ask. Pseudoscience is something that masquerades as science but is not.
These are the requirements for something to be pseudoscience: 
  • It must seem like science.
  • It must assert that it is science. 
  • It is unscientific in one or more fundamental ways (usually that it is unfalsifiable)
The particular subject of today's discussion is SETI, aka the Search for Extraterrestrial Life. 
SETI probes space, searching eternally for any signal from another intelligent civilization. 
My discussion group consisted of Alexis Hayes, Nevaeh Chamlee, Daniel Burnett, and Sincerity Baker. 

We agreed that SETI is a science, not a pseudoscience. This is because SETI only hypothesizes that extraterrestrial life exists, but does not assert it directly. SETI's hypothesis can also be falsified eventually, because if every planet is searched, then it will eventually be proven or disproven. 
Those two factors prove that SETI is a real science. 

These radio arrays are what SETI uses to search for signals

https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTaXOQ79rM2Hpx_cqIwQK_1rLMOc00oHFixkDcTtq_fuPj5Iu_1

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