I'm your average middle-aged guy who lives near Washington, DC. I've always been interested in space and space exploration: my dad was one of the engineers on the Spacelab project.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
I think there's a higher probability that life exists than it doesn't. The benefits and dangers are largely in our own minds. Trying to validate the existence of life through this kind of valuation isn't appropriate - anymore than we'd appreciate being viewed by other life as something that's just in their way as well.
The most unambigous information I think we could send would be the period table of the elements and the value of pi out to a hundred places. There's little likelihood such numbers would be argued as randomness.
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.
