I'm a Physics Graduate Student at the College of William and Mary. Doing my Ph.D. Research at Jefferson Lab in Newport News, VA.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
I believe extraterrestrial life exists in some form or another. At best (within the next century), we will probably discover it in it's most primitive form (a few microbes at best). This will help scientists understand how life evolves elsewhere.
Transmitting a beacon out into space is a fruitless idea. The power necessary to do such a thing is beyond our current capabilities... and in what direction would we send it?
I run SETI@home so that my machines are doing something while I'm not using them. This type of distributed computing is a great money efficient way of analyzing the amount of data that has been collected.
I'd suggest modifying the current analyzing scheme in incorporate other scientific aspirations as well as the current goal of finding signals from extraterrestrial life.
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.
