It doesn't really matter to me if SETI finds life outside our solar system; I know I won't be alive to meet ET's in person. However, there are many other benefits to this program that are much more immediate, and I just think it's cool to participate in the largest distributed computing system the world has seen so far.
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.