Helping any type of project/coin/whatever that's not centralised or under the control of your government is the best thing you can do.You can't help with SETI since we, as a civilisation, are in conact with extraterestrial life forms by long time. Even if we aren't, SETI is an useless program as it takes thousands/milion years till the message you emit is recepted by another civilisation, if it is ever received at all. It's pretty much obvious we won't be here after a couple milion years in order to receive the message. And even if we receive it, we can't be sure the civilisation that replied us still exist ( extinction due to internal or external warfare ). There are much more efficient methods of trying to contact another civilisation. I could go on with arguments, but that's not the point.
You can help with other projects but what's the point ? If humanity really wanted to invest in medical projects, for example, they would stop spending trillions on weapons and/or any other warfare related items. They could just assign 1000 supercomputers and do it easier, faster and more efficient that we could ever do as community.
Mining is NOT a waste of energy, it's a viable alternative to the imminent colapse of the current economical system. Just keep mining, guys
P.S: p4xil, it would be much more efficient if you'd post in your Optimizing Guide for Gigabyte WF3 7950 thread a good CGMiner config for Bitcoin too. Thanks