[goodcanadian]

I don't have a reference for you, but I recall a study a decade or two ago that suggested that we would only be able to detect our strongest radio signals out to a distance of about 10 light years with existing telescopes (I may have that number wrong, but it was not large). That said, with new telescopes, particularly things like the Square Kilometre Array, we have higher sensitivity, and more importantly, we have the angular resolution to measure whether an excess of radio emission is coming from a star or from a planet around that star. So, even a weak signal can be detected, and if we were to find such a signal originating from a planet rather than another object, we could make a pretty good guess that it is artificial in origin.