My reason to run SETI is very simple. Most of the time my computer is just playing music and the processor is almost idle. So I've decicded to run SETI to do something about it. I think that doing some research is far more useful than doing nothing.
I think that the idea of SETI is very clever. Many computers connected to the internet most of the time have nothing to do, so it's a good idea to cluster them and make them do some resarch and in that way save some money that would be spend on high-end servers. Servers, which would be used to compute all the data that the SETI project gathered. Furthermore all the computers at home when they are clustered are more powerfull than the centralized server possibly could be.
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.
