AuldSoul
Similar paths of technological development is quite a reasonable assumption if you study how innovation and discovery works. You can't have a technology involving manipulating electrons until you know there are electrons to manipulate and know how to manipulate them; thus the lack of TV's before the discovery of electromagnatism and the electron.
I can see statistically Earth doesn't stand out if we use available evidence, which as it is what we have is certainly better than speculating by ignoring available evidence. We know for a certainty they will not need Earth for resources. Such advanced civilisation would (given where we are after 200 years of proper science) be able to artificially manipulate their biology to an extent we can only begin to speculate on. I don't need pie-charts for this.
Unless most speculation is wrong and life is a very rare thing it is unlikely the nature of OUR life would be of interest to a alien civilisation of FTL-level savvy as the amount of life in the Universe and the resources of any one civilisation to study it would mean each occurance of life would have a very small statistical chance of having an FTL-level alien race examine it. Again, no pie-charts needed.
I think you are excluding every suggested possibility based on terran thinking, and applying terran thinking to the probable behavior of ETs. Can you account for why you believe an FTL capable ET species would think like a carbon-based mammal just barely out of the trees?
Your own postion or advocacy of a position where they have interest in us or have progressed so far they don't notice us is based on the same terran thinking. Thus it is the logical validity and statistical liklihood of claims I examine.
I tend to tie this in with the pervading human belief of 'specialness' seen in the beliefs of every culture of humans. Each culture thinks it is 'special'. Even in sci-fi there is a common assumption that humans will be 'special' when they meet other intelligent races.
I feel there is more likely there is a psychological need in humans to feel we would be special and to attract the of ET's, or god, or whatever, when in fact we are not special unless we make ourselves so and both that and the definiton of that is up to us.
Aphrodite
Abaddon, we think lions are special compared to us, what about dolphins and every other living thing? So why wouldn't aliens think we are special enough to study?
Mmmm... not so much the degree of specialness I suppose as the number of bugs to researchers.
Statistics.
If life is uncommon in the Universe, given the scale of the Universe it would be widely scattered in space and time, and an intelligent example of life getting to interact at all with another intelligent example of life would be quite unlikely. Somewhere in the region of a small finate number divided by a virtually infinate number or close enough to zero to be getting along with. There would be few researchers and few bugs in an effectively infinate forest and the two would never be likely to meet.
If life is common in the Universe and there is a small chance of each example developing to intelligence, we again have a low chance of interaction, a finate number divided by a virtually infinate one. There would be few researchers and lots of bugs in an effectively infinate forest and an individual bug would be unlikely to get the attention of one of the few researchers in an effectively infinate forest
If life is common in the Universe and intelligent life is also (comparatively) common the chance of interaction is higher, as we are dividing a very high finate number by a virtually infinate number. There would be lots of researchers and lots of bugs in an effectively infinate forest. Still a small chance based on how many rocks don't have bugs under them...
Thus alien contact is most likely in a Universe where life and intelligent life is common. And virtually impossible in other scenarios purely on the basis of statistics.
For us to be worthy of special study when we are one of many pre-star-travel civilisation is very small unless one assumes that aliens (all of their efforst put together) devote fantastic levels of resources to such study by doing it all the time to all possible planets. To assume they would devote large resources requires some motivation, and there is none in this scenario as we and our solar system are just commonplace, as are most solar systems.
We would be less special than lions, in other words. About the level of some bug that ate leaf-litter in the Amazonian forest. There are a lot of these and whilst some people are interested in them the chance of any one species of bug being studied is very very small; most are not even catalogued or known yet.
This solar system is far more likely to be famous as a place where oxygen-breathing life-forms can witness a full solar eclipse on the surface of a planet with an oxygen atmosphere than it is because humans are special.
Having a sun 40 x larger than a satelite 40x further away is probably a rare thing, as is an oxygen atmosphere.
