I love the idea to be able to help in the hunt for contact. Even if we never will find it this way... we will have tried... we will have learned. The search for knowledge is a grand part of the answer to the meaning of life for us humans... what ever we do... even if it fails... we gain some new knowledge.
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.