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IIRC, I think the Keck and VLT telescopes can detect Earth-sized planets using the wobble method. So we could probably find terrestrial, Earth-sized planets in the "life zones" of various stars, but we wouldn't be able to directly see them. Now NASA is planning it's Terrestrial Planet Finder mission which will be able to get chemical spectographs of the atmosphere of exo-planets and it could concievably tell us whether life and/or civilization exist on exo-planets out to 40 light years. It will be able to directly image an Earth-like exo-planet, but it would only look like a dot of light. Also the ESA is wanting to launch the Darwin mission, which is a space based interferometer with six 1.5 meter telescopes. It will have greater resolution than the Terrestrial Planet Finder, they're planning to launch around 2014. That's a long time to wait, but it will be amazing to see the results start coming in. We could actually have an answer to whether life exists in other solar systems by 2020.