As a member of a species scientifically advanced enough for space travel I would ignore exterior features (skin color, hair color, etc) and look at the DNA. Once I’d mapped the human genome I’d look for the most distinct variations of those physical characteristics.
That’s what I was initially thinking, but I came to the conclusion that there is some basis for just concentrating on phenotypes alone. I thought if we could get samples of all the extreme phenotypes, then we would have established the (approximate) boundaries of human phenotypes and thus everything else must fall between those extremes.
I’ll just take the contestants from the Miss Universe contest. They’ve even been labeled for me!
Yeah, I know but the point needed to be made that they represent a rather narrow view of humanity. A generic human by definition does poorly to represent to variety of phenotypes. Many of which are not small segments of the population in general. Kimmy Gibbler doesn’t understand value statements so I made a clear (but overly broad one) there. I still hold by my statement that a clean shaven male is biologically incorrect.
That’s why I stopped shaving.
How is this thought experiment relevant to anything? Aliens categorizing humans as a separate species need to segregate us based on physical features, because they aren’t us and they don’t see us “from the inside,” as it were. But we aren’t categorizing ourselves for aliens.
Similarly, humans tend to categorize cats based on their size and color. But cats use other categories to categorize other cats, because they are cats.
My point is that how aliens categorize humans is not relevant to how humans categorize humans.
When I was little, I had books of cat and dog breeds, and I spent a lot of time looking at them. There are thousands of teeny tiny variations in color, size, and body part shape that distinguish one breed from another - especially in the case of cats, which have a smaller range of sizes than dogs. In addition, within each breed, there is a breed “standard” (usually allowing for things like certain color variations), and even more minute variations determine how close any individual is to the standard.
So, considering this task with that in mind, the first thing I thought of was “fur color”, and then, like Lasciel, “redheads”. 
I’d want to make sure that I got one of each fur color, type, and growth pattern naturally occurring in each “breed” I found.
For instance, looking at head-fur, I’d want to collect at least one light-, medium-, and dark- in the warm and cool ranges of reds, blondes, browns, black-browns, true blacks, and non-age-related whites, as well as the rarer multicolor variations. (I’ve occasionally seen humans with hair that naturally has blonde hairs mixed with browns and reds, similar to salt-and-pepper greying; it’s a very striking effect, like a brindle, and I would be remiss if I didn’t include it in my collection.) This would only encompass naturally occurring colors, but that does indeed include albinos, since I’d find them to be a fairly common mutation. And of course, then there would be combinations like “red-head-fur/red-body-fur”, “blonde-head-fur/brown-facial-and-body-fur/black-genital-fur”, and so on.
I’d also want all the fur types; greatest variation seems to appear in the head-fur, but I’d pay attention to the bodily fur as well. So we have thickness - thick and wiry, medium weight, light feathery-fine - as well as texture - kinky, tightly curled, loosely curled, wavy, loosely wavy, and perfectly straight - and density - thick, sparse, or entirely hairless.
And then there are the growth patterns. Take the hairline on the forehead, for example. On most humans, head-fur starts a couple of inches above the eyebrows, arcing down to meet the tops of the ears. But there some humans that have an inch or less of bare skin between the eyebrows and the hairline. Often, this is accompanied by a much closer hairline on the sides of the face as well. Then there are humans with a great deal of skin showing on the forehead (not counting age-related balding). And of course, the hairline may be rounded, square, or have a widow’s peak. There are numerous patterns in facial and bodily fur as well.
And that’s just the fur.
The next things I’d consider would probably be skin colors (with the same considerations as for fur), eye colors, bodily structure, and shape and orientation of various body parts. Earlobes: free or attached? Nose: wide/mid/narrow, bridge high/mid/low, bridge straight/concave/convex, bridge sloping straight from forehead or indented between eyes? Fingers and hands: long and slender/short and thick? Torso: long/short/wide/narrow/deep/shallow? Musculature: pronounced/slender/thick/sinewy? And so on and so on.
Then, after I considered all the combinations, I’d have to determine which differences indicate a breed vs. variations within a breed. Taking cats and dogs as examples, I think I’d come up with at least a hundred breeds, with tens of allowable variations within each.
But are we just collecting them for show, or do we get to eat them?
I agree that Kimmy’s post was pointless and irrelevant with respect to the OP. However, you were in error in alleging that the Pioneer plaque was intended to depict Caucasians, or was racist.
No it isn’t. This is a rather narrow view of human diversity. There are a number of human populations in which males typically have little or no facial hair, including Asian and Amerindian ones.
Less realistic is the failure to depict pubic hair (or the female individual’s vulva), but Sagan admits that he was concerned about being seen as sending “porn to the stars” on the part of government bureaucrats, and so provided a design with a less realistic depiction of the genital area in order to facilitate approval.
My goodness, Colibri! You and Acid Lamp sure can’t stop talking about my “pointless and irrelevant” post!!
:dubious:
Heart of Dorkness post indicates the problem with this: either we collect all 7 billion humans (okay, you can leave out the identical twins, triplets etc.), or … 1 female, 1 male. Seriously, we run into the problem of “How do you describe a house?” - “I know it when I see one”. First, we don’t know how aliens perceive us; if they need to distinguish us from chimps and other apes (which we most closely resemble), but don’t know enough humans, then you are already cheating by collecting humans without clothes. And as AcidLamps own example shows, what’s the use of collecting one blond, one brunette, one black-haired, one ginger, one white-haired, if humans can colour their hair, and hair changes naturally over time, too (many children have very blond hair, that turns to light brown, and later to white - aliens are never going to grasp this!)
It reminds me of several articles about how “those” people look all alike - Asians to Whites, Whites to Asians, Blacks to Whites, Whites to Blacks - because each group looks at different markers - Blacks and Asians don’t look at haircolour, but at shape of the nose, Whites look at hair- and eye-colour - and for people with not a lot of exposure to the other group, the “foreigness” trumps all other characteristics. So if Joe White grows up in a neighborhood with 1/3 of Asian children and 1/3 of black children, he will see so many different faces that he will learn to tell them apart; but if Jack White grows up among only Whites, the first black person he sees, he will only remember that “Smith = black” and not the other aspects of his face.
Aliens will have the same reaction to humans, because they have never seen one. Either they will lump us together with apes, or they will see about 6 billion different species.
To give a semi-serious scientific response to this:
A scientist who is seriously trying to characterize the variation within a population doesn’t selectively collect “types” (at least not any more). If at all possible, a scientist will try to collect a random sample across the population. Then variation in color, size, proportions and other characteristics can be assessed statistically.
By collecting “types” you immediately make assumptions about how the population varies and what the important characteristics are, and will merely confirm whatever initial bias you may have. A century or more ago this kind of typological thinking was prevalent, but today is discounted by most scientists, although it remains prevalent in the general public.
Given that the human population is now 7 billion, is globally distributed, and shows great variation as well as intergradation across huge areas, I would ideally want to collect several million specimens at a minimum to get a handle on variation.