>I'm personally doubtful we could detect our own civilization today if we had a clone of humanity orbiting Alpha Centauri, and that's still well within our RF l

>I'm personally doubtful we could detect our own civilization today if we had a clone of humanity orbiting Alpha Centauri, and that's still well within our RF light cone. This interests me. Could we launch a sufficiently weak sensor(I'd suggest my first-gen Moto G) into far solar orbit and try and perform the same kind of analysis we perform on extra-solar objects? Wouldn't it be useful to have a platform where we can perform control experiments?