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The International Flag of Planet Earth

flagofplanetearth.com

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The rings are not interleaved consistently, which is annoying me because there's no explanation as to why.

The middle ring is on top of all the rings, but the two bottom ones.

The right-most ring crosses its neighbours from under, instead of in an interleaved under/over like the other rings.

The top-left ring crosses its neighbours from over, in the same fashion.

The other 4 outer rings are (clockwise) over their precedent, then under their following ring.

I'm curious if it's on purpose. If it's not on purpose, then I'm a bit disappointed that something so obvious wasn't found, when the rest of the presentation and discourses suggest great consideration. If it is indeed on purpose, then I don't understand why it's not explained, and why they made the top-left, right most and center rings different from the other ones.

Anyways, in other cases I'd say I'm nitpicking a whole lot. But this is a flag design, their text appeals to great consideration for the craft of designing flags. I'm a noob and I can notice the inconsistency, so I'm perplexed.

I'm guessing this is because if it were interleaved consistently, then it couldn't possibly be constructed in 3D space.

Try it your way. Maybe it looks more boring?

As with these sorts of things, I respect the academic exercise, but they always feel really arbitrary. Like, I could pick fifty different decent symbols and color schemes and come up with something that kind of looked good and might be a good Earth flag in a movie or something. If that's the goal, then the challenge isn't really that hard.

If you really wanted to explore a flag for Earth, you'd engage people from around the world. What symbols are important to them? What colors? How do they want to be seen? What does it even mean to them to have a flag that represents Earth as something uniquely ours? And such. Then begin to distill these ideas down into a flag. Or try to create a process by which an idea could be brought about. And try to get buy-in from all of these diverse people. That's the hard part. The interesting part!

(Also, nitpick about the video: 5:8 != the Golden Ratio.)

And that's the fundamental flaw of human nature that prevents collaboration at a large scale: Everything needs a story, a hero and a name. That that slows decision processes down almost to stagnation, and it often results in decisions that aren't based on reason, but on names, heroes and stories. To some extent reputation is certainly a useful heuristic, but at some point everybody has to accept that they are only bags of cells that have to execute the most rational action sequences in order to survive. In that sense I would actually be in favor of a simplistic Earth flag design. We'll likely have to remove any memetic baggage from our decision making in order to survive.

That would lead to analysis-paralysis pretty quickly. Just saying.

Isn't that sort of the point?

"Make a static, single, identifiable representation of a massive, diverse, scattered, irregularly sparse time-malleable dataset"

If you read until the page's end, you'll see this is an undergrad school project. So, I'd guess bringing all the world's nations to consensus was out of scope.

That said, they did a wonderful job, and, as indicated by the fact this is on the front page, they have captured a world wide consensus of sorts.

This one is still my favorite: http://imgur.com/gallery/7ze3a

That one is a lot more interesting, though it's basically just a map, which is atypical for flags.

The OP's flag is very abstract. Presumably, any other alien race also strives for unity and lives.

It's hard to create a better flag without actually knowing aliens and having some idea of commonalities and differences with humanity. Indeed, maybe we need a flag for humanity, not planet earth?

These would be the current candidates for humanity:

http://leonardodavinci.stanford.edu/submissions/clabaugh/ima...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque#/media/File:Pio...

And my personal favorite: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1f/Voyager_...

(BTW there is a flag for earth: http://static.news18.com/pix/2015/04/UN_flag.jpg )

I wasn't aware the UN actually had a flag for Earth; BTW, it seems they don't regard Antarctica as belonging to our planet...

It's not really the flag for earth. But it gets kinda close being official flag and having 193 member states out of 194(?).

Well, the exact number of countries is a very messy issue and the definition of what is a country tends to be "whatever other countries acknowledge to be one". This can be especially awkward if some of the other countries don't want to accept its status and the rest plays along because they have no incentive to get involved.

Not so atypical for recent flags:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Cyprus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Bosnia_and_Herzegovina

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Kosovo

The programmer in me can't help but think about the maintenance map-based flags incur with border changes.

I have similar reservations about the US flag. :)

That is functionally a horrible design. Imagine a couple hundred solar systems. It is very likely that one will have exactly 8 planets with their 3rd planet being their home planet. And even if such a system doesn't exist, this map doesn't stand out at all. At a glance it could represent any solar system: "Hey, this map has planets and a sun. Which solar system is that? I have no idea." This introduces unnecessary confusion and possible conflicts.

Symbolic representation of a solar system is the most generic thing you can choose about a solar system. A flag should be something unique that stands out from other ones.

I like this one by a Hello Internet listener:

http://i.imgur.com/WT7TUAf.png

https://www.reddit.com/r/vexillology/comments/37udsu/my_best...

Once we do colonize the solar system I'm sure invidual moons of giant planets will play a larger role than the actual planets. So I don't see this working in the future.

The only future we can truly expect, aside from total annihilation and reset of the planet, would be a total colonization of the solar system.

It's still where we as mankind originated and seems somewhat appropriate. However, maybe that's short sighted and we will get a very anti-earth separatist movement from the colonies.

But, if it is to be a "flag for planet earth", it would not need encompass colonies on other worlds, and it wouldn't be the goal of such a flag to do so. If, as someone else suggested, the right idea is a flag for humanity, then your argument works.

Why not? if Mars is colonized then there be 2 white dots on this flag (not sure why the moon is white)

It looks quite good actually

Needs to have Pluto knocked out :-)

Neil?

Seems like using a flag that gives an unknown contact your home address is a bad idea. That information might not be something we want to communicate right off the bat.

Since we are constantly broadcasting at high energy and with interesting patterns, I wouldn't worry about that. Everyone who sees this flag is either from Earth or knows its position very well.

Completely agree. Reminds me of Liu Cixin's Three Body Problem novels :)

I just read that and the Dark Forrest and that (fundamental) part of the book honestly made no sense to me. His claim that you can't locate a signal's source location was in complete conflict with everything I thought I knew about astronomy and how we locate things in space.

Too late, we've already sent self-addressed envelopes out into the Cosmos.

http://www.exploringbinary.com/binary-code-on-the-pioneer-10...

If an alien civ discovered that flag somehow, we've probably tipped our hand.

You might want to send your concerns to SETI

One suggested solution to the Fermi paradox is that any civilization that gets noisy enough to get noticed quickly gets attacked and destroyed (or taught to hide better in the future...)

That is a brilliant. IMHO a reversed out guilloche graphic like the one on the spacesuit is to hard to duplicate or draw.

Was about to hunt that one down to post. Glad to see I'm not alone.

Having a flag for planet Earth is an oxymoron. The very purpose of a flag, and nationalism in general, is to be a symbol of a nation, and the very concept of a nation can only exist in contrast to other nations. One side of the coin can only exist because there is another side. All of Earth, considered as a whole, has nothing to compare itself to. We call the sides of a coin “heads” and “tails”, but we don’t have a word for the “side” of a sphere, since it would be pointless.

(Incidentally, there are already a few symbols for the planet Earth: Unicode 2637;TRIGRAM FOR EARTH¹ and Unicode 2641;EARTH²)

That said, there may be a need for a slightly related symbol: In the world today there is a common assumption of nationalism, so whenever some grand achievement is done, there is the assumption that it is done in the name of some country or other, and everything is done with a place reserved for a symbol for that country – commonly a flag or a heraldric shield. To contrast against this, we may need a symbol against nationalism.

① http://graphemica.com/%E2%98%B7

② http://graphemica.com/%E2%99%81

I'm not so sure. All sorts of things appear on flags that aren't to do with nationalism. You can put a smiley face on a flag if you wanted to, and hoist it above your outhouse. You can put a skull and cross bones on a flag and put it over your DJ mixing desk.

There probably is intelligent life out there. If we meet them one day, and they have a flag representing their planet. "Hi Earthlings, you don't have a flag?"...awkward.

>To contrast against this, we may need a symbol against nationalism.

The 'against-nationalism-ism' would just turn out like a nationalism. After all, it has a flag.

Just look how the International turned out when they managed something resembling of the revolution they longed after in one corner of Earth.

Well, there’s always the “against centralized authority” symbol: Ⓐ

> All of Earth, considered as a whole, has nothing to compare itself to.

Except other planets.

As I said, Earth-the-planet already has perfectly good symbols. And, as dietrichepp already said, planting the Flag of the planet Earth on Mars just seems weird, so I don’t think the symbol was intended to symbolize Earth as a planet, but rather Earth as “where all the people are”.

Two things:

1) Blue and white aren't exactly politically neutral. They tried to give Iraq a blue and white flag, with blue stripes representing the rivers. It did not go well.

2) A flag should not be so complex that children cannot draw it with crayons. The interlocking rings are nice, but the specificity of which goes under which makes things too difficult. The union jack is perfect example of this complexity but at least there is was the result of various mergers.

Point 2 is a reasonable concern, but in this case, I think it's fine. If a child draws interlocking rings with a crayon, it's impossible to tell which ring is on top. So children can draw this without a problem, they just draw each circle in whatever order they want and it will look fine. The ordering concerns only come into play when using a medium that can represent which ring is on top at each crossing.

I completely agree with your second point. Being able to easily draw a flag is a really nice indicator of how nice your flag is (eg. is it too complex? Does it scale well?).

Look at the image posted by dakridge: https://imgur.com/gallery/7ze3a Anyone could easily draw that, and that makes it much better than OP's flag.

Ya, but its a little dated now. Any reference to the number of planets cannot survive the next upstart science teacher pushing out a new definition to get himself on the daily show.

Are you referring to Pluto losing its status as a Planet? That was a complicated process that was based on new discoveries and not some idea by some "upstart science teacher" on the daily show. Keeping Pluto as a planet would have made our definition of planet very wide and to be consistent Ceres should have to be turned back into a planet as well.

Here is a much better proposal, with the added benefit of keeping our planet safe:

http://traipse.com/upgrade/

This was quite unexpected and has brightened my day

Remind me of this: https://i.imgur.com/mkyyF9A.png

polish flag should be white over red.

Also some of the shades don't match - these are precisely defined, I think.

(and as it's unlabelled: the linked flag as a whole is the Norwegian flag)

Just googled for "earth flag". Among the various results, this is the only one that impressed me:

http://marketblog.envato.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/ru75...

Not saying it could actually be used as a flag. Notice how it puts the accent on us rather than the environment. I find it fresh and combative, it reminds us of our unity but also of our animality. It says very well who and what we are (without giving away our address!). However it's not inclusive and well-meaning enough to be politically acceptable. Isn't that strange?

All the other efforts, including the one linked by the OP, look trivial or perfunctory to me.

Stylish, sure. But this Earth is so much more than just one species of primate. If life is to define Earth, it should be more inclusive.

Yet another possibility is to use UN flag as representing earth?

Also any "planetary" space program, as opposed to country specific programs like NASA for US, JAXA for Japan etc, can be under some newly created body, like "UN space program" or something.

I thought of the same thing. Aren't the United Nations supposed to represent us all on several issues? Though even if there is a maritime organization, there's nothing regarding space and its exploration. I guess it's time to bring in more bureaucrats :-)

There are a large number of political and practical reasons why the U.N. flag isn't going to be used to represent earth, the biggest one being that few nations would say the U.N. as a body represents anythijg more than the interests of the five permanent members of the security council.

Add on the fact that the organization as a whole is bloated and encumbered by institutional dogfighting that would put Microsoft to shame, I don't see any UN funded/backed/approved space ventures happening anytime soon. Theres a reason the ISS isn't under a UN flag.

Can you imagine why and how any of those powers -- or any of the others -- would agree to anything else?

If the security council can agree on a policy how to represent Earth, they have armed might to back it up.

If they do not, all the bets are off, but I suspect that most of the powers and many smaller countries would do their utmost to fight down any independent movement claiming to represent the Earth their governments do not approve of.

The UN is a bloated thing of corruption, but so is most of all of the organized humanity on any scale, so that's quite fitting. Most of our existing international operational frameworks both de jure and de facto are coordinated under the UN or very related organizations. Assuming the world will resemble the one we live in now, if a need to represent the Earth arises (like, say, alien contact) and if everyone who matters agrees how to deal with the aliens, they'll probably just stick the UN sticker on that decision. If they do not, sucks for us.

If someone not-UN will start their space adventure to find aliens, they'll use their own nationalist / corporate / ideological symbolism. If they in addition claim to represent the Earth or the Humanity instead of just themselves without everyone's approval (can't see that happening, I doubt the permanent members would agree precisely because the reasons you outlined), they will probably have a war at their hands at home. In that case and without drastic changes in the international political reality, I'd wager that the ones who can make their claim to stick would be the UN permanent council members, because that's how they got in there in the first place.

I prefer this one... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Terra_flag.gif

Aqua, terra, aer et somniorum.

All I can see is a striking resemblance to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_hazard

The implications are apt, I’m afraid

It's an interesting start, but the balance feels a bit off. A bit too yonic in the center and the way the rings overlap with negative space makes it look worse at small sizes. Realistically speaking a flag is in many ways the way you are different from other flags but this raises the question: Who is looking at the flag of Earth? Who does the flag not represent? In the short term I'd argue it's Venusians or Lunarian settlers. To them a flag that represents origins is more important. I like the idea of a blue background symbolizing water / the earth sky, and the primary molecule that makes up our actual tissue, but the symbol in the middle shouldn't be based on circles. All planetary life would want to use a circle. Especially as the flag for the first planet that humans arise from, it's weak.

In the long term the symbol for Earthlings may even be observed by aliens. In what ways will we be different from them? The flag may even be used as a symbol for other Earth species like Dolphins once we get the technology to communicate with them effectively or to artificially increase their intelligence.

My ideal Earth flag: a blue marble on white or black background.

It doesn't have an organisation or even a not-very-organized ideological movement or anything to back it up.

Thus, all the symbolism remain meaningless because practically nobody cares about it. And those who care or say so (for whatever purposes) are probably sporting UN emblems, and have been doing that for about half a century.

In reality, if the need arises, we'll use the UN org and its flag to represent Earth, if it's still around (it probably will) and security council can decide upon what to do with the aliens (no idea).

(Assuming the pessimistic but oh-so-realistic scenario, cooperation won't probably work out, so we'll probably have the majority of security council maybe waving the UN flag (if the majority is suitably overwhelming), the others waving whatever alliance symbols they bother to come up with (if at all, in the world wars just different compositions of national flags were popular in the propaganda, and that's not likely to change), and the first global civil war. After it's over and if there's still someone around to declare themselves as the winning side, the victors' flag (which will be used) will be a meaningful flag full of symbolism.)

The flag represents nothing. Humanity is divided.

For the purpose of human unity, this is a great idea. As globalization progresses, rallying behind divisive banners may become less and less relevant (or they may shift to non territorial notions, but that's a whole different story).

But why overthink the symbolism? We already have the globe outline [1] as a relatively well understood symbol.

[1] Unicode U+1F310

This is a silly project that solves a problem no one has. When we encounter aliens, it'll maybe make sense to have some designation for humans/earth as a whole. In the meantime though, it's completely meaningless.

And the flag itself is... ok I guess, but there are a million designs that would be equally acceptable.

I just don't get the point.

I'd say it creates a sense of unity with those that travel into outer space.

I concur. When I see some spacecraft bearing the flag of one particular country, I feel something is missing, for I myself also feel part of quest for a greater understanding of our boundaries with outer space. A flag of the earth would create that sense of unity you referred to.

Yeah, I'd say acceptable, and I could get used to it with time. But honestly, it seems to me that every time someone makes a flag for a real-world thing, it almost always suck. Why can't they just hire Michael Okuda, whose work in Star Trek (and NASA) produced really pretty logos and flags?

http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/underwire/2009/06/image-9a...

https://startreklives.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/emblem.gif

Still, I'm willing to wield current design because solidarity as a species means more to me than petty design issues :).

> Why can't they just hire Michael Okuda, whose work in Star Trek (and NASA) produced really pretty logos and flags?

Flags are supposed to be simple, and Michael Okuda's work has too many details.

Those are all either 1) a derivation of the general "starfleet arrowhead" or 2) a ripoff of the UN flag. Most of them are also afflicted with awful outdated-looking gradients.

I'm not sure if "ripoff" is the best way to think of those designs. They were likely conciously constructed with those elements with the intent of portraying a believable future descended from our present.

Why not use the Olympic flag. Isn't that the purpose of the Olympic Games? To unite humanity?

If you read up on the actual Olympic Games and the Olympic Committee, you could get the impression that their purpose is to unite humanity against the Olympic Committe.

Well, common enemies tend to be the best bonding agent in any given situation, so I propose the following:

Azure, the Olympic symbol argent. Motto: "Fuck the International Olympic Committee!".

Couldn't we just use the flag Daffy Duck used!?! http://www.gargaro.com/webpages/general/marvin17.jpg

What a bunch of nonsense. Can we at least start acting like humans are marginally advanced by just skipping the whole flag thing, a fetish used in ancient times to indicated who you belonged to and to communicate across open space during combat and for wholly violent and militaristic reasons.

Sure, it's not really a flag, a piece of fabric suspended from a big stick, but at the very least, let's simply go with an icon, rather than "flag", aka, rectangle. It's so primitive an nonsensical.

Looks ugly.

That was my knee-jerk reaction, as well. Sort of a less interesting variation on the Olympic flag.

Now this, this has pizzazz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_in_Futurama#/media/Fi... /s

Yeah, the Futurama one is just fine if you subscribe to American Exceptionalism. Which would suit 4.48% of the world population just fine.

...

Without javascript, this page renders as empty white space.

I suppose it is made up of complicated things like text and images, so maybe an unfair observation.

Anyway, the flag. Sure, make an Earth flag, good idea. But I think it should look better than a few interlocking circles. Needs a bit more spice or something. Let's call the 7 circles version 0.1. Looking forward to version 0.2.

If the earth needs a flag, then the flag has the purpose to identify the earth and indicate the origin of an earthling. Thus, it should look like the earth as seen from space. Which would result in the borders of our continents. This would be boring for us, but it would make sense for aliens.

Wow. Who would have thought it'd be a bunch of overlapping rings? I'm completely surprised.

For a good podcast / ted talk on the elements of a good flag design, check out:

http://99percentinvisible.org/news/99-invisible-at-ted/

I think anything with five or more interlocked rings are illegal in any country that wants to ever host the Ol*mpics.

I seem to recall a game (or something) that had a similar logo to this flag but had to be redesigned.

Found it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legend_of_the_Five_Rings#Inter...

Interesting last picture where there is a row of the American flags and then a lonely Earth Flag. I would have though it would be Swedish flags as this project is from a design college in Stockholm.

Few other countries love displaying their flag as much as the US (plus a lot of stock photography just happens to come from the US), so I'd wager it's the easiest place to find stock photography to put the flag in.

outer space is not the right term to describe low earth orbit. It's the nearest space there is, and if you're there, you're strongly gravitationally bound to the earth itself.

Lol this flag actually looks like the flag of some Japanese shogun. Maybe somebody has even already used it in history!

I expected a blue disk on a black ground.

I hope by the time this flag is used, space suits don't have to be that bulky.

Why would you put the flag for planet Earth on Mars? That just seems confusing.

I would like to hang this flag outside my home.

It needs more.. pop? ;)

Joking aside, I kinda dig it.

It looks like a logo of some bank.

What will the favicon look like?

Don't we have the Olympic flag already?

tl;dr - a self-promo piece by Oskar Pernefeldt, whoever this guy is.

It was a school project.

10/10 photoshop skills

Pure utopia man. But, we could make a first step by helping the refugees from middle east and people of downtrodden African nations.

Uh oh, world flag? What`s next a universal P2P crypto currency to be used across nations...? Smells like NWO reptilian agenda is advancing :-) Seriously though, this is really nice initiative.

HN, where's your sense of humor? :)

Great, give us an Earth flag and we can go stick it in things and claim them! Then we can explain to the local inhabitants how that has changed their situation. We'll need pamphlets in a universal language too.

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