I am a thirty-something Berkeley grad that went into computers after getting my nearly useless history degree. I am now an UNIX consultant searching for intelligent life in the tech sector.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
Of course there is extraterrastrial life. I look up at the stars and figure each star has a die roll's chance of supporting life somewhere in it's solar system. Sure it's like rolling a super-mega-hyper crit, but there are a lot of stars.
The idea of the SETI project doesn't take a genius to come up with. If one of those planets that I am sure supports life isn't completely populated with dimwits, then we have already been discovered. The only reason to send a beacon is to convince THEM that we are friendly and so they don't take "Must See Thursday" too seriously.
I run SETI@home so I don't feel too guilty leaving my computer on when I am not using it. I figure the depletion of earth's resources is justified. I stopped running SETI@home for several years when I found out that they threw out the data from the first couple of REVs of the program. I managed to get over that little fact though.
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.
