A picture taken during Apollo 8 made us think about protecting the earth. Environmental protection agencies immediately followed. A photograph of our Earth hung in space changed the world.
Maybe the discovery of extra-terrestrial intelligence will make us think about how similar we all are, and how silly our ethnocentric belief systems that divide us are, and perhaps significantly change the world again.
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.