I'm an evolutionary biologist and an advocate for the creation of decentralized residential colleges in large universities (see my website collegiateway.org).
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
I participate in SETI@home and have encouraged students to participate because it can be used to discuss so many different concepts in science from the historicity of life to the use of Fourier transformations to the promise of distributed computing. Even if the project produces negative results, detailed and documented negative results are valuable in themselves, and so many techniques are being developed in support of SETI work that many other fields will reap benefits from it.
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.
