Scientists in US are urged to seek contact with aliens

[Fumesucker]

30. It wouldn't surprise me if it could be done with current technology

I have no idea what future or alien technology is likely to be capable of except it's almost certain to be better than our own current state of the art.

Angular resolution is dependent on receiving antenna size, put them in space and antennae can be arbitrarily large, making an antenna the effective size of which is the same as Earth's orbit is doable with current technology (albeit extremely expensive to get into space) and a photon is a photon. We don't have a reason worthy of the expense to do such a thing but it will probably be done sooner or later just because it can.

I take photos of objects that are well below the noise levels of my sky background on a regular basis and my equipment isn't remotely state of the art even for amateurs, just an old DSLR and a couple of camera lenses.

For instance comet Lovejoy and the Pleiades I posted recently in the photography forum, I live on the outskirts of a major metro area and the sky here is definitely not dark.