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Comment by butlike | Hacker News Reader

It should be a white flag. All the colors, and the fact we embraced it as a flag of unity over a flag of surrender should say all there is to say about us getting over our differences.

Edit: From Wikipedia: (A white flag) serves as an internationally recognized sign of truce and negotiation, meaning "we want to talk". It emerged as an ideal symbol for peace because it is highly visible on the battlefield, is easy to make, and doesn't belong to any specific nation.

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A white flag used to be the flag of France: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_France_(1814...

A world flag should not use flags which were associated with a country. Evan this proposal is too derivative of the Japanese flag.

I love that they published the SVG. It's invisible.

The Japanese flag references the Sun, and it's hard to aim for astrological minimalism and not look similar. Still, the transparent background is a bad idea IMO, because a spaceship/space station with painted flags will look very funny.

Nevertheless, I think the Earth flag should include the moon too. A blue Earth, a white Moon, and a black background. When the Moon secession war starts, the laser holes in the flag could double as the starry sky.

> It should be a white flag.

And it will be.

White flags are commonly associated with defeat in battle. Probably not the vibe one wants.

from the post you replied to:

> and the fact we embraced it as a flag of unity over a flag of surrender should say all there is to say about us getting over our differences

hard to change an association that has been around for millennia (literally)

Yeah I don’t disagree, but I think the difficulty is kind of the point in the GP’s post: it would take an unprecedented era of peace for us to collectively agree that the idea of “surrender” is an anachronism ready to be reclaimed for a better purpose.

Which is why we still worship man-with-bird-head and make sacrifices to the Sun at solstice.

White flags are easy to see in the midst of battle. Don't overthink it.

Especially if this represents the Earth in the face of aliens on other planets and they happen to know the flag of surrender... It would definitely give them the wrong impression about Earth.

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