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The International Flag of Planet Earth

flagofplanetearth.com

71–80 of 109 posts

Re: The International Flag of Planet Earth

#71

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.

Re: The International Flag of Planet Earth

#72
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.

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.

Re: The International Flag of Planet Earth

#73
post #38

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 aro…

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.

Re: The International Flag of Planet Earth

#75
post #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…

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.

Re: The International Flag of Planet Earth

#76

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…

Try it your way. Maybe it looks more boring?

Re: The International Flag of Planet Earth

#77
post #6

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?

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

Re: The International Flag of Planet Earth

#78
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.

Re: The International Flag of Planet Earth

#79
post #6

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 )

Re: The International Flag of Planet Earth

#80
post #66

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.
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