I do believe extraterrestrial life exists. If other beings don't make contact with us first, I think it will be a few hundred years or more before we find a place to try and make contact.
Yes we should transmit a beacon for others to find. We wouldn't need to send any information until we got a reply.
I run Seti@home because I'm interested in astronomy and I thought I might as well let someone make good use of my computers processing power while I'm not using it. Seti@home is a good project as it allows for detailed analysis to be carried out on collected data without one group having to put up a heap of cash for some supercomputers. It also lets people like myself get involved in something that interests them.
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.
