I remember reading about a nifty deep space probe that would travel 25-50 billion miles from earth. They were going to use a 1 meter parabolic mirror with a laser at the focus to communicate with the earth. I wonder what the numbers regarding wattage per distance at a given data rate show. I wonder how much better this is than radio frequency.
More precisely, it reflects them. I don't know what the Earth's albedo is in that frequency range, however, so I can't tell you how far away we'd be able to see an Earthlike planet with MAXIM. But what it shows is that with interferometry, you don't need a gigantic telescope to get awesome resolving power.