Scientists at NASA have actually figured out how potential plants on other planets might be colorized. Depending on the planets atmosphere (that works as a radiation filter, so it kind of decides what light that will be served to any plant down on the surface) and the type of star it orbits (for example, our sun emits most of its energy in the green spectrum…although most of this is later absorbed by the ozone in our atmosphere), the plant could be in basically any colour but blue. Although blue is a tempting colour for making up alien rainforest, flesh eating flowers and so on, it is a highly unlikely imagination since the majority of photosynthetic organisms harvest blue light and leaves no left over for the eye.
What makes my head scratch is why the scientist believe that they might find organism that would resemble our world's photosyntetic organisms that much. I would imagine the evolution of photosyntesis far too complex to be reproducible in similar ways of what we know. But hey, that's just my humble 25-year old mind being snotty.
Sources:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-color-of-plants-on-other-worlds
UPDATE
Wouldn’t this be the perfect evolution study project: you take some (tons!) earthly seedlings of various known plant species, hitch a ride with a space shuttle to the closest planet with a life-friendly atmosphere and place out the seedlings all over the planet. Then go home, watch TV and wait a couple of million (or billion) years until you can return to the planet. When you return, you ought to see how time and new premises have affected photosyntesis. Would all of the plants evolve in the same directions (e.g. would they all be green? Or red? Or yellow?) or would they have scattered into a rainbow of photosynthetic possibilities?
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