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I'm curious how close we are to being able to image planets to detect unnatural light. Searching for alien light pollution from planets found by Kepler would be pretty neat.

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I once listened to a lecture/book from Neil deGrasse Tyson and he mentioned that for distanced over 500 lightyears, it is pretty much impossible to see any kind of artificial light from a planet. The telescope would have to be kilometers in diameter. I think the main problem is the local star and its brightness.

Interesting question regarding telescope limits: http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/17881/is-there-a-...

Is building a Kilometer sized telescopes really that difficult? What about a formation of satellites.

Impossible is a pretty strong word to use for something that is possible but economically infeasible given current technology. I'd be curious to NDT reasoning on the subject.

There have been a bunch of proposals for telescope satellite arrays and there are a few in progress like ARReST at Caltech & Surrey (which uses cube sats)

The Hubble orbits at about 600km. Getting something many km in size to orbit the earth properly might be difficult.

... we already do. It's called radio :)

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