I think SETI is great. I don't think it will find any hard evidence of E.T. however it will give us an idea of where to look when more powerful tools are at our disposal.
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.
