We can’t even detect earth sized planets yet!
Let alone pinpoint the system location either. Anything over 50 light years away we could be out by a light year from the true distance. Lots of work still to do.
Agreed. Like null and void said upthread, our current technology can just barely detect super-massive planets that orbit close to their parent star. By definition, none of those are earthlike.
Our sensing technology has to evolve to a higher level before we can easily detect small rocky planets like ours in other solar systems.
Even sending a probe to the nearest star system would require a huge investment using current propulsion methods and the results might only be seen by our great-great-grandchildren.The data could be beamed back to us at the speed of light,getting the dat-gathering platform there will take a long time.And it would almost certainly have to incorporate a foolproof nuclear power reactor .Someone care to calculate the transmitter power required and antenna size to send the probe's data back at even "dial-up" rates?
The current Kepler telescope was designed to do just that, and has been finding planets for about 9 months now. The telescope will give us an order of magnitude more data about other solar systems, and is the first telescope that can find earth sized planets. As you can see from the posts on the article and here, the data will be very controversial up until the end of the mission and beyond. It will give us the best set of data on this for the next few decades.