So, planet hunting on this little rock is in it's infancy,but doing well. But it's one thing to detect a wobble or a transit effect and quite another to know that there's something interesting going on in the system you're looking at. How about making a planet fluorescent? This could be done in 2 ways. 1. Simply fire a bunch of super bright fluorescent material, I suggest quantum dots (I suggest 3 different frequencies from blue to red in the ratio of 3:1:4), at a nearby planet, Mars hasn't been pulling it's weight recently. or: 2. Find a nice wet planet and fire GM fluorescent bacteria/algae at it (ratio not so easy here). That would mean that anyone looking might say to themselves: "ooh, that looks like another planetary system, couple of gas giants further out I'd say.... hang on, that's a funny spectrum moving in up-and-down-in-intensity, what could create that...." and so on.
-- bs0u0155, Dec 23 2011

Glow in the dark organism http://www.livescie...ungi-glow-dark.html
There are many organism that glow in the dark Fungus is one of them. [travbm, Oct 29 2015]

Glowing algae http://usatoday30.u...ing-sea-algae_x.htm
Algae can glow in the dark also. [travbm, Oct 29 2015]

Fox Fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxfire
a fungi that glows in the dark. [travbm, Oct 29 2015]

Novelty http://www.glowingplant.com/
Grow you own glow in the dark plant. [travbm, Oct 29 2015]

Anyone else out there who are looking for planets have undoubtedly discovered the same tricks we have; considering that most (if not all, I'm not sure) of the planets we've discovered thus far have been detected not optically but via forces exerted on nearby bodies, it stands to reason that others probably won't be trying to lay their naked occular appurati on our little mudball either. Also, Jupiter is known to shine very brightly in non-visible-to- humans spectrums already, so all we really need is a great big blacklight, no?

Still, bun for glow-inna-dark planet(oid)s. I suggest the backside of Luna; we know how to get there, we're not doing anything with it at the moment, and as far as we know neither is she.

Addendum: it might be easier, as oft proposed, to just shine a bunch of really powerful lasers in the direction of likely neighbors. My only original variation on this conceptually-overbaked idea would be to trace out a giant middle finger with the projector, and when the recipients of the message show up to investigate, we tell them what it means and interstellar hilarity ensues. Insult comedy must have universal appeal, or else somebody would have smacked Don Rickles in his fat mouth three hundred years ago.
-- Alterother, Dec 23 2011


// as far as we know neither is she //

So you know, monkey boy. It's free parking for our Cube, that's what it is. We doan't neeed no steenking luminous stuff ....
-- 8th of 7, Dec 23 2011


[Mars hasn't been pulling it's weight recently] [+]

Yeah. Slackers!!
-- wagster, Dec 23 2011


the thing with lasers, you're average workaday interstellar class lasers, is that they need power, and the thing about power, nicely conditioned laser-grade power, is that it requires civilization. The thing about civilization, your average common-or-garden variety laser-making standard civilization is, that it's around for about 3 blinks of an eye. Fluorescent planets should outlast the civilization, and be visible from all directions, in all planes all the time. Much more cool. We might want to leave a time capsule on said planet as well, containing a Cadbury's Flake as a marker of Earth's creative zenith.
-- bs0u0155, Dec 23 2011


You've sold me, [bs0u0155]. We're going to paint the Borgs' parking spot flourescent pink.

With a Hello Kitty motif.
-- Alterother, Dec 24 2011


Algae and fungus have been know to grow so planting something or having a pool or garden of glowing stuff is all you would have to do.
-- travbm, Oct 29 2015


Good idea. But I highly recommend using prime numbers instead of pi. 3:1:4 only encodes 3 digits of pi, and then only if the aliens also count in base 10. Furthermore, 3+1=4; that's a plausible result of a natural process. Prime numbers have long been used to encode our messages to aliens, and we expect the aliens to do the same, because as far as we know, they can only be produced by math, not physics or chemistry.

And in addition to the ratio of intensities, you could encode information in the ratio of gaps between wavelengths. That would probably be better, actually, because it's less susceptible to distortion by gas/dust in between us and them, and less affected by the spectrum of whatever's illuminating the phosphors. Tuning phosphors using chemical compounds is pretty much impossible with chemical compounds, AFAIK, but I think it's pretty easy with quantum dots.

Edit: Disregard my second paragraph if that's what you meant.
-- notexactly, Nov 09 2015



random, halfbakery