I'm from Berlin in Germany and I've heard of SETI@HOME a few weeks ago. As fast as I could, I installed the SETI Client on one of my PCs to have a look how it works. The first package took about 35 hours. So I looked for another PC that is much faster than the first one. After a few days there were 5 PCs running SETI. Now I'm proud of an average CPU time of 11 and a half hour inspite of knowing that it has to go faster :-)
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
SETI is very interesting for me and I'm glad to have the possibility to take part in it. I think we shouldn't ask us whether there is extraterrestrial life or not because we know how gigantic the universe is and the assumption that there is no intelligent life except of us is more than arrogant. The only question is if we are able to find the others. The danger of finding other intelligent life is possibly that they are hostile. The benefit of such a finding would possibly be the technical progress of them. I run SETI@HOME because I think it is a very good idea to do anything for this overall question of extraterrestrial life. Very interesting is the fact that so many users joined SETI@HOME never mind which origin they are.
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.
