Earth needs a flag. How about this one?

Picture this. The year is 2025 and humans are finally colonizing Mars. A multinational team of astronauts from China, Russia, Japan, the United States, Brazil, India, and the European Union touches down on the planet's surface. Time to plant a flag and claim victory. So, whose flag?

Well, this is awkward.

Luckily, a Swedish artist has anticipated the problem and designed a solution: the International Flag of Planet Earth. 

Oskar Pernefeldt created the flag as part of a graduation project at the Beckmans College of Design in Stockholm. The logic of the project is simple. "Space travelers," he writes, "are more than just representatives of their own countries. They are representatives of planet Earth."

True, no single nation owns Mars, and the moon hasn't been divvied up among rival powers. But for as long as space programs have been around, they've been inextricably tied to national ambitions. 

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union wasn't about which country would fly an International Flag of Earth in outer space. It was about two rival superpowers competing to develop aerospace technologies while dueling for the biggest share of power on the international stage. The USSR didn't launch Sputnik on behalf of the world. And although Neil Armstrong famously called the moon landing "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" as he stepped off Apollo 11 and onto the lunar surface, the flag that he and Buzz Aldrin planted in the Sea of Tranquility was the stars and stripes. NASA had considered using the flag of the United Nations, but didn't, and by 1972, NASA astronauts had planted another five American flags on the moon.

Today, space programs are still very much national projects. China plans to land its Chang'e-4 probe on the unexplored or "dark" side of the moon. (Will it leave behind the flag of the People's Republic?) Brazil and India also have ambitions space programs. 

Still, there are signs that space exploration could ultimately transcend national interests. Private companies like SpaceX are developing aerospace technologies that will belong more to shareholders and the marketplace than to any state. The International Space Station has been a site of international cooperation for decades, even if politics on the ground have sometimes intruded, like recently, when Russia's annexation of Crimea threatened to sever its ISS relationship with the United States. And let's say science-fiction fantasies about planetary colonization and even alien encounters do become realities in the distant, or not-so-distant future — it's hard to imagine the next giant leap for humankind taking place under any single nation's flag.

If Earth's future space travelers aren't planting the flag of a multinational aerospace corporation, Pernefeldt's looks like a pretty good option.

Here's how he describes the design:

Centered in the flag, seven rings form a flower – a symbol of the life on Earth. The rings are linked to each other, which represents how everything on our planet, directly or indirectly, are linked. The blue field represents water which is essential for life – also as the oceans cover most of our planet's surface. The flower's outer rings form a circle which could be seen as a symbol of Earth as a planet and the blue surface could represent the universe.

It'll be a while yet before anyone plants this flag on Mars. But Pernefeldt thinks we can already put it to work on behalf of Earth as a reminder to the people that "we share this planet no matter of national boundaries" and "we should take care of each other and the planet we live on."