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The International Flag of Planet Earth

flagofplanetearth.com

51–60 of 109 posts

Re: The International Flag of Planet Earth

#53
post #6

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

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.

Re: The International Flag of Planet Earth

#54
post #22
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: The International Flag of Planet Earth

#55
post #45

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 :-)

Re: The International Flag of Planet Earth

#56
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.

http://graphemica.com/%E2%98%B7

http://graphemica.com/%E2%99%81

Re: The International Flag of Planet Earth

#57
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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...)

Re: The International Flag of Planet Earth

#58
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: The International Flag of Planet Earth

#60

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 pre…

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