By any physical standard that our society uses, Natalie Portman is beautiful.
Similarly, by the standards that our society uses, this woman (selected at random from the Internet) is not physically beautiful. If we are to be honest with ourselves, she is not even remotely attractive:
We obviously care about such things. Natalie Portman is a tremendously talented actress, but if she had the same talent but looked like the second woman, would she have the opportunity to pursue an acting career? Unlikely.
But while we care about such things, would an advanced, non-human intelligence care?
What if, for example, such an intelligence was extraterrestrial in nature, and looked like this:
For such a creature, all humans would probably look more or less the same, just as all sperm whales look more or less the same to us.
But we can go even further, and posit that an advanced non-human intelligence is non-corporeal. Perhaps it exists as thought, in a way that we can't imagine (no pun intended)? Perhaps it exists in the physical realm, but not in a way that we can really touch, like a "ball of light".
For such a being, our physical attributes - our conception of what is beautiful, and what is not - wouldn't matter at all.
We would all be "beasts" to them, and if there was a beauty in us for them to find, it would be found elsewhere - in our compassion, perhaps, or our intellect, or our imagination, or our humility.
Until we understand that principle, "contact" will elude us as a society, even as it occurs to those individuals who can see past the superficial notion of beauty that we have created, and find the deeper beauty that exists hidden underneath.
Paul Kimball
