I'm just a guy in sweden with an Athlon 1000 Mhz that sometimes doesn't have anything better to do than crunching numbers.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
Hmm, really hard questions, except number 3. I run it because I get that fuzzy feeling knowing that I've helped :-)
I think that extraterrestrial life exists, it is after all very likely that it does... But it would be hard to send information that they can interpret.
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.