I believe the future is vital, seti provides a small portion of this future to each of us. There are other projects like seti, the other day i came accorss one that used data units to search for a cure for cancer.
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.
