Two Flags for Our Species

Some thoughts on the present astrovexillology discourse

A current point of Twitter discourse is the idea of creating a flag for humanity. Some amount of Artemis II/Project Hail Mary discussion seems to be drumming up the science fiction brains of the collective brainrotted Twitter unconscious, and I’m very much into it.

But oh my goodness, some of these people have ridiculous opinions about flags!

This is not going to be an annoying CGP Grey style post where I talk about how text on flags is a teleological evil or whatever. I want to share with you two proposals for a flag for the human race; I want to explain why one is better than the other and why it’s important to remember that everything that lives will die.

A Brief History of Sci-fi Humanity Flags

The idea that there should be a flag that represents all of humanity isn’t a new one. Wired has attempted to chronicle it, as has Wikipedia, but I think that these efforts are a little bit misguided. These flags were made for different reasons at different times.

A few highlights from the Twitter discourse:

• The World Peace Flag of Earth (1913): hideous. Sorry.

• The United Nations Flag (1952): a fine flag but its design is predicated on humanity’s relationship to itself, not to the rest of the universe.

• The United Federation of Planets Flag (1960s): Star Trek is great but the Federation is a collective of many races, not just humanity. That’s why it has so many stars in the design. No such collective exists in our world yet.

In the framing of the current discourse, we are looking for a flag that represents humanity in a cosmic sense. Whether one wants to imagine that as a logo for humanity’s next international space project or the symbol representing humankind at some galactic parliament of alien races, the motifs remain the same.

What first must be established is that there is a difference between Earth and Humanity. This conflation of the two is important and I think that is the source of the present beef.

Consider the two flags that are at the center of this discourse at press time. These are both pretty good pieces of design. But they tell different stories because they represent different things.

The Humanity Flag

Image: u/Caribbeandude04 on Reddit

This flag is based upon prehistoric cave paintings: those first imprints of art that our pre-civilisation ancestors made for reasons we have no way of knowing. It both emulates the typical negative-space hand paint cave art style¹, but it also symbolises a raised hand of friendship: a near-universal sign used throughout history between humans who did not recognise each other’s tribes but understood each other as “man”.

This flag is, in my opinion, a masterclass in vexillology. For the cavemen, this was a statement of “I am here”: a marker of home, a collective project presumably for rituals or group bonding. One can imagine those handprints were as profound to them as they are to us as we read about them on Wikipedia.

For us in 2026, those hand paintings are a statement of “we were here”. A message (sent unbeknownst to the senders) to remind us modern apes where we came from. We are the race that shivered in our dark caves from the rain and the predators one too many nights, and said “enough of this!”. We are the race that defiantly marks our place in the universe; madly firing probes into the deep, screaming at the top of our lungs with radio signals into the great beyond.

The cave art of our ancestors is a reflection of ourselves and our human impulses— our desire to be and to be seen, in our own time and in the futures that we will never touch. To me, that’s the project of humanity, for better or for worse.

The Earth Flag

Image: @braingrub_ on Twitter

It’s a good flag, I guess. The white-on-blue design evokes the human-built institutions that tried (and failed) to form a rules-based world government. But the distinguishing feature is the map of the cosmos traced in white lines, a facsimile of Carl Sagan’s illustration etched on the Pioneer probes of the 70s.

The lines are actually distance markers, triangulating the position of the sun relative to our nearest pulsars. The thinking is that if an alien civilisation found Sagan’s map aboard those lonely probes, they could triangulate the position of Earth based on the pulsars (which any advanced civilisation would probably have detected) and come say hello. It’s a nice sentiment, if a little bit dangerous.

But it’s not a flag for us. It’s a flag for the Earth. And listen, I’m a huge fan of Earth. But it’s just a planet. We are not its masters, nor are we Gaia’s beloved favourite children. We are a species clinging to Earth’s greasy film; fragile, easily wiped out in any number of ways.

We are not Earth. We are humanity. We love Earth and the Sun and we depend upon them both, but we are not them. There will most certainly be successor species to humans on Earth, after all. Isn’t it a bit bold of us to claim our identity as “the position of the sun relative to the Milky Way Galaxy”?

We today are very similar to prehistoric humans. In our time, as in theirs, humans are little more than frightened cavemen. While our ancestors feared saber-toothed cats and starvation, we fear nuclear holocaust and maligned AI superintelligence. We are now, as ever, a fragile speck of water and carbon on this green Earth. We could be snuffed out in an instant and Earth would hardly even notice. In a million years, there’d be little trace that we ever were, save for nuclear isotopes and a few microplastics in the crust.

Humility as Pride

We are humans. We are stupid, bold, brilliant, terrified, divided, arrogant, self-important, and without oxygen gas we die.

In our quest to create a flag for ourselves, we don’t need to pretend like we are permanent. All that a flag for humanity needs to do is show what we are.

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I’m a Resident at Inkhaven 2 in Berkeley, CA. I am writing 30 posts in 30 days for the month of April. See my progress here!

1. Or whatever you call it.