To add to the other answers: Which of these faces do you find exceptionally attractive?
It's a similar question. They'd think we all look similar. They would probably notice differences in the colour of our clothes first - that is if they see colour the same way, which they probably wouldn't. Then - as a minor detail, that we have different coloured hair and some don't have any hair. And slight differences in skin tone, at least, would seem slight to them I think. Look very closely and they might notice our eyes differ in colour.
As for shape, then our faces would all look as similar in shape as sheep faces do to us. Far from being able to tell who is attractive, they'd have a lot of difficulty just telling us apart at all, to start with anyway (people who work with sheep or are very familiar with them learn to tell them apart easily).
I think we would all seem to have identical faces except for those who have had serious accidents, lost one eye, lost a limb, that sort of thing they'd spot.
They wouldn't even notice many asymmetries that we notice, I think. We are sensitive to the shape of a human face and spot tiny asymmetries that we'd not notice in another kind of shape or pattern. Say, if someone is missing one of their eyebrows, to take an example, we'd spot right away. They might not notice for some time, or at all.
Sheep do notice each others faces, it's been found in studies, and find some sheep more attractive than others.
Some other animals don't use visual cues for attractiveness at all or hardly. So they might not even associate attractiveness with vision. But instead say with smell, or sound. They might find some of us smell somewhat better than others. Might even find us as a species very attractive just as we find some species of animals very attractive. But then again they might not.
Here is a talk that mentions sheep quite a bit. A mother sheep recognizes her lambs by scent. But sheep also use face recognition.
“Getting to know you”: how do animals recognise each other and us?
For that matter, human ideas of attractiveness vary hugely from one society to another.
In several countries, black teeth were and sometimes still are thought beautiful. This is not just teeth gone black through eating betel juice. They actually die their teeth black, using various dies, much as some Westerners bleach their teeth white. And women especially are thought to be beautiful if they have black teeth, including songs about the blackness of a woman's teeth.
Black Teeth Beauty
See also Ohaguro
Also practiced in parts of China and in Oceania as far East as Madagascar. ‘The missī-stained finger-tip of the fair’: A cultural history of teeth and gum blackening in South Asia
Extra terrestrials probably have great works of art praising the translucency and sliminess of jellyfish like creatures, or the wrinkled skin of mole rat like creatures.
In many parts of Africa, then women are though to be beautiful if they are very fat. In Mauritania, young women as young as seven used to be force fed to be as fat as possible to look beautiful. Also adult women in the quest of ways to make themselves more beautiful buy drugs on the black market to make themselves fat, drugs for fattening camels for instance. It's a major health issue. Some of these black market fattening drugs they take can be harmful to their liver, others get illnesses associated with obesity.
Here is a photograph of an African beauty according to this ideal of beauty.
And a video about the practice:
If you lived in Mauritania, if educated you'd be opposed to this practice. But you'd still think that fat women are more beautiful than thin ones.
So - no chance at all of figuring it out without us telling them, or somehow indicating it. Or them doing careful anthropological study of one of our cultures.
Because - it depends on the society, you'd first have to tell them which society it is. Even once they become more familiar with the appearance of humans, and learn to tell us apart by sight, still, there's no chance without some starting point like that.
After all, they probably have their own aesthetic, if the recognize each other by sight. Even the blob fish, the winner of the "ugly animal preservation society" award for the ugliest creature in the world, surely doesn't see itself as ugly:
UGLYANIMALSOC.COM
Blobfish: Australia (Video)
Or this fish, said to resemble shrek
Or - I wonder what the ideal of beauty would be for a pink fairy armadillo?
Animals that you didn't know existed.
Surely a blob fish sees other blob fish as beautiful, at least if they recognize each other via vision.
Also there are many other strange creatures that existed in the past and dropped out of the fossil record which have body plans that no longer exist. ETs could easily have body plans based on these or other stranger creatures. For instance, this could easily be an ET :).
Burgess Shale type fauna - Reconstruction of Opabinia
I can imagine that ETs that look like these creatures write great works of poetry about other blobfish or opabinia and have statues of them and great paintings of the most beautiful and inspiring blobfish or opabinia of all time - which all look alike to us.
So, for a blobfish, perhaps humans will look more attractive, the more they resemble blobfish - in other words - not very.
So unless we tell them what to look for, they'd go around trying to find humans with fat drooping noses and tiny sad looking eyes, and wide down turned mouths. And if asked for beauty advice, they would suggest nose jobs to make our noses nice and wide and blobby and floppy, and that we smear our faces with slimy pastes to make us look gelatinous to make us more attractive and get rid of the unhealthy dry appearance of our skin.
At least that's what I think myself, which I think helps to put things in perspective. Just saying how I see things.
From time to time I get glimpses of this, what humans might look like if you weren't human yourself. Perhaps in a crowd, look around, see all these creatures rushing for trains or whatever it is they are doing, and - somehow get a glimpse of what they might seem to an ETI - if they were say octopi, or orang utans, or parrots all bustling around their business, carrying suitcases, checking for tickets etc.
Rather like a Beatrix Potter illustration. (She was a naturalist actually, specializing in fungi, which she did many beautiful illustrations of)
Beatrix Potter | biography - British author
If you think there is more to it than that - well my question is, if we meet ETIs who look like blobfish or some other form that seems ugly to us - is our opinion on what looks beautiful in some objective way more accurate or better than theirs? Or do you think that they will see the world exactly as we do?
Which is not to deny at all that there are many great works of art and much inspiration to be found from human beauty in all its forms.
And also doubtless many great works of art produced similarly by Opabinia or blobfish shaped ETIs elsewhere in our galaxy or universe that are similarly inspiring to them, getting inspiration from the great beauty of other blobfish or opabinia. Well so I think anyway.
And, yet, for all its particularity and sometimes silliness, and fragility - this beauty, wherever and however we meet it in our lives, sometimes, somehow, it can take us out of ourselves, lead us to see something beyond the confines of our narrow lives.
File:Flock of sheep.jpg
It's a similar question. They'd think we all look similar. They would probably notice differences in the colour of our clothes first - that is if they see colour the same way, which they probably wouldn't. Then - as a minor detail, that we have different coloured hair and some don't have any hair. And slight differences in skin tone, at least, would seem slight to them I think. Look very closely and they might notice our eyes differ in colour.
As for shape, then our faces would all look as similar in shape as sheep faces do to us. Far from being able to tell who is attractive, they'd have a lot of difficulty just telling us apart at all, to start with anyway (people who work with sheep or are very familiar with them learn to tell them apart easily).
I think we would all seem to have identical faces except for those who have had serious accidents, lost one eye, lost a limb, that sort of thing they'd spot.
They wouldn't even notice many asymmetries that we notice, I think. We are sensitive to the shape of a human face and spot tiny asymmetries that we'd not notice in another kind of shape or pattern. Say, if someone is missing one of their eyebrows, to take an example, we'd spot right away. They might not notice for some time, or at all.
Sheep do notice each others faces, it's been found in studies, and find some sheep more attractive than others.
Some other animals don't use visual cues for attractiveness at all or hardly. So they might not even associate attractiveness with vision. But instead say with smell, or sound. They might find some of us smell somewhat better than others. Might even find us as a species very attractive just as we find some species of animals very attractive. But then again they might not.
Here is a talk that mentions sheep quite a bit. A mother sheep recognizes her lambs by scent. But sheep also use face recognition.
" If the sheep normally used faces to distinguish between categories of individuals we argued that they would not have to learn to do this task and would always chose the face that was most attractive to them. This is exactly what happened. The sheep chose sheep faces over human ones and familiar sheep faces over unfamiliar ones. We mainly used female sheep for these studies and they showed a clear ability for distinguishing gender. When they were not sexually interested in males they chose female faces every time, but switched to choosing male faces for a couple of days during each cycle when sex was on the agenda. They even showed some preliminary evidence for individual recognition by actually having preferences for the face of one male over another (the media referred to this as a kind of sheep dating agency!). Interestingly, more mature males seemed to get the vote over younger ones! (Kendrick et al., 1995). So being an old ram or goat may have its compensations. In any event, face cues are clearly being used for attraction as well as recognition in sheep and we confirmed this again in studies we carried out establishing that mothers particularly influence the female facial characteristics that their male offspring found attractive when they grow up (Kendrick et al. 1998) (Ma Ma’s Boys as one paper put it!)."
“Getting to know you”: how do animals recognise each other and us?
For that matter, human ideas of attractiveness vary hugely from one society to another.
In several countries, black teeth were and sometimes still are thought beautiful. This is not just teeth gone black through eating betel juice. They actually die their teeth black, using various dies, much as some Westerners bleach their teeth white. And women especially are thought to be beautiful if they have black teeth, including songs about the blackness of a woman's teeth.
See also Ohaguro
Also practiced in parts of China and in Oceania as far East as Madagascar. ‘The missī-stained finger-tip of the fair’: A cultural history of teeth and gum blackening in South Asia
Extra terrestrials probably have great works of art praising the translucency and sliminess of jellyfish like creatures, or the wrinkled skin of mole rat like creatures.
In many parts of Africa, then women are though to be beautiful if they are very fat. In Mauritania, young women as young as seven used to be force fed to be as fat as possible to look beautiful. Also adult women in the quest of ways to make themselves more beautiful buy drugs on the black market to make themselves fat, drugs for fattening camels for instance. It's a major health issue. Some of these black market fattening drugs they take can be harmful to their liver, others get illnesses associated with obesity.
Here is a photograph of an African beauty according to this ideal of beauty.
And a video about the practice:
If you lived in Mauritania, if educated you'd be opposed to this practice. But you'd still think that fat women are more beautiful than thin ones.
So - no chance at all of figuring it out without us telling them, or somehow indicating it. Or them doing careful anthropological study of one of our cultures.
Because - it depends on the society, you'd first have to tell them which society it is. Even once they become more familiar with the appearance of humans, and learn to tell us apart by sight, still, there's no chance without some starting point like that.
After all, they probably have their own aesthetic, if the recognize each other by sight. Even the blob fish, the winner of the "ugly animal preservation society" award for the ugliest creature in the world, surely doesn't see itself as ugly:
Blobfish: Australia (Video)
Or this fish, said to resemble shrek
Or - I wonder what the ideal of beauty would be for a pink fairy armadillo?
Surely a blob fish sees other blob fish as beautiful, at least if they recognize each other via vision.
Also there are many other strange creatures that existed in the past and dropped out of the fossil record which have body plans that no longer exist. ETs could easily have body plans based on these or other stranger creatures. For instance, this could easily be an ET :).
I can imagine that ETs that look like these creatures write great works of poetry about other blobfish or opabinia and have statues of them and great paintings of the most beautiful and inspiring blobfish or opabinia of all time - which all look alike to us.
So, for a blobfish, perhaps humans will look more attractive, the more they resemble blobfish - in other words - not very.
So unless we tell them what to look for, they'd go around trying to find humans with fat drooping noses and tiny sad looking eyes, and wide down turned mouths. And if asked for beauty advice, they would suggest nose jobs to make our noses nice and wide and blobby and floppy, and that we smear our faces with slimy pastes to make us look gelatinous to make us more attractive and get rid of the unhealthy dry appearance of our skin.
At least that's what I think myself, which I think helps to put things in perspective. Just saying how I see things.
From time to time I get glimpses of this, what humans might look like if you weren't human yourself. Perhaps in a crowd, look around, see all these creatures rushing for trains or whatever it is they are doing, and - somehow get a glimpse of what they might seem to an ETI - if they were say octopi, or orang utans, or parrots all bustling around their business, carrying suitcases, checking for tickets etc.
Rather like a Beatrix Potter illustration. (She was a naturalist actually, specializing in fungi, which she did many beautiful illustrations of)
If you think there is more to it than that - well my question is, if we meet ETIs who look like blobfish or some other form that seems ugly to us - is our opinion on what looks beautiful in some objective way more accurate or better than theirs? Or do you think that they will see the world exactly as we do?
Which is not to deny at all that there are many great works of art and much inspiration to be found from human beauty in all its forms.
And also doubtless many great works of art produced similarly by Opabinia or blobfish shaped ETIs elsewhere in our galaxy or universe that are similarly inspiring to them, getting inspiration from the great beauty of other blobfish or opabinia. Well so I think anyway.
Amongst all these stars - if there are ETIs there, surely they must have countless different ideas of beauty. Great works of art, inspired by beautiful (in their eyes) ETI equivalents of our blobfish, opabinia, sheep, or whatever.
And, yet, for all its particularity and sometimes silliness, and fragility - this beauty, wherever and however we meet it in our lives, sometimes, somehow, it can take us out of ourselves, lead us to see something beyond the confines of our narrow lives.
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'
625. Ode on a Grecian Urn. John Keats. The Oxford Book of English Verse
About the Author
Robert Walker
Writer of articles on Mars and Space issues - Software Developer of Tune Smithy, Bounce Metronome etc.Studied at Wolfson College, Oxford
Lives in Isle of Mull
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