1. Just plain curiosity
2. If there's something out there, it will take a joint effort to find it
3. It would be great if this could be an un-obtrusive program which ran in the background of all computers sold.
SETI@home and Astropulse are funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and donations from SETI@home volunteers. AstroPulse is funded in part by the NSF through grant AST-0307956.