I do think that extraterrestrial life exists and when we do find it and find that it is sentient, that a lot of very deeply held beliefs of humankind will have to be reevaluated.
I run seti@home because I enjoy contributing to a project that is larger than myself. I think it is very very cool.
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.