Preferred position of humans in the food pyramid?

[Zixinus]

First, it depends on the writing. As for personal preference, it depends on the aliens in question. I could live under benevolent alien rule.

Personally, I prefer to think that I might have a bit more sense of scale.

The galaxy is enormous. I also don't believe that our alien cousins might even be able to breath the same atmosphere as we do. It would be more interesting to see that happen. Unrefined resources are mostly plenty all around the galaxy, and only planets that fit a certain specie's environmental-profile would be of much worth, and only to that species.

But overall, I prefer to see aliens as equals to humanity. However, I somehow doubt that humanity would be that united, but rather fractured to everywhere if they can be, and I expect aliens to be the same.

[Sidewinder]

You know Sidewinder by your reasoning the Rebel Alliance would be the galactic empire because everyone cheers for the master.

There are plenty of people on this board who cheer for the evil Galactic Empire, including Darth Wong.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

It depends on the story, and the assumptions one is willing to make. The notion that you'd have a whole bunch of species at the same tech level at the same time is an unrealistic contrivance created to make for a more interesting story, as the probabilities involved are simply mind-boggling (unless one assumes that technology can only progress so far before stalling, but even then, an ultra-pacifistic race with 100,000 star systems under their control that has had a million or ten years of civilization will be able to absolutely steamroll the stereotypically aggressive Human empire that's only been around for a few hundred years and controls 100 planets. And they'll be able to do this by ramming attacks alone, on the account of the overwhelming advantage in industry they will have.)

Essentially any older, more advanced civilization will be angels to our cavemen ... so, our interaction with them will largely boil down to a treaty which states "We acknowledge that we're cavemen, but we're well-behaved cavemen . . . so don't kill us, plzkthx!" And, likewise, any species less advanced than us will likely be cavemen, and will likely have nothing meaningful to offer us . . . unless we were in the "uplifting" business (for example, realistically, what can we offer an interstellar alien species today? We can barely pony-up the energy to get into orbit, whereas, they'll have spent more energy just getting here than we've used in the entire history of the human species several times over.)

[RedImperator]

In my own writing, I go either humans-only or humans plus a handful of alien cavemen (who are mostly irrelevant background details). If I need something weird, I gin up weird human derivatives; culture, technology and the genome are flexible enough to create "alien" societies which are still human enough to meaningfully interact with baseline H. sapiens. The kind of stories I write need recognizably human protagonists and antagonists, and I'm not going to cheat by making "aliens" who act exactly like humans with forehead bumps and funny hats.

[Axiomatic]

I'd like humans as the only sentient species, but humans who have spread out so far and have adapted and changed in so many ways that many might as well BE other species. Humans who have extra arms and who can survive in a hard vacuum for several hours. Humans who share their memories and personality traits over a p2p network. Humans with metabolisms cranked up so high they see the world in bullet time. Humans who can photosynthesize oxygen and can live for several weeks on nothing but sunlight and morning dew.

[Spanky The Dolphin]

You know Sidewinder by your reasoning the Rebel Alliance would be the galactic empire because everyone cheers for the master.

There are plenty of people on this board who cheer for the evil Galactic Empire, including Darth Wong.

There's a tremendous difference between liking cool bad guys and actually rooting for them to win.

[Ariphaos]

In my latest incarnation of Solar Storms, humans are the first species to visit another star system in the Milky Way. I tried writing aliens leaving Earth alone and undetected for umpteen various reasons but they were all lame. In a Universe with FTL, either humans are the first in the galaxy, or humans are quite close to at most one species technologically. The latter seemed silly, so...

Humans end up being peers with a half dozen or so 'great powers', which collectively are either underdogs to another power that is trying to wipe them out, or serving the goals of that power. The overwhelmingly vast majority of species in Creation pretty much consider these forces (humanity included) to be gods.

[Darth Ruinus]

For some reason, I meet lots of people who never ever like "Humans are the Gods of Space" idea. They always say someone is mroe advanced, someone has been around longer.

I got around that in my writing to just make Humans the oldest race (to explain why we havent heard from anyone yet)

[Stark]

In my own writing, I go either humans-only or humans plus a handful of alien cavemen (who are mostly irrelevant background details). If I need something weird, I gin up weird human derivatives; culture, technology and the genome are flexible enough to create "alien" societies which are still human enough to meaningfully interact with baseline H. sapiens. The kind of stories I write need recognizably human protagonists and antagonists, and I'm not going to cheat by making "aliens" who act exactly like humans with forehead bumps and funny hats.

Red, that's because you don't write just to live out juvenile fantasies. If you're objective enough to look at it and say 'these aliens are just humans with anger problems/blue skin/eight legs', you're too objective to write personal-identification fiction.

Personally, I don't think the fact that the best science fiction either has no aliens or has aliens dealt with in a cosmopolitian way is a coincidence.

[Strider]

I liked what Baxter did with the 3E Human Empire. Humanity really wasn't ALL that different from the norm among the (very many) starfaring species in the Milky Way. But they started off with more than a touch of Xenophobia, and had bad experiences early on: two invasions which conquered Sol and had to be beaten down by human insurrections generations later. And then came along the 3rd Expansion, the Assimilation, and Humanity ruthlessly conquered and destroyed everything they encountered as they expanded through the Milky Way.

If Humanity is going to be in a dominant position in the galaxy, a plausible story needs to have them get lucky a couple times and possess at least one fairly exceptional trait (in this case, unrelenting hatred). Statistically speaking, there isn't really a reason Humanity SHOULD have any exceptional traits to draw upon, but I think it can make for a more interesting story. It should also be noted that in this Cosmology Humanity is never more than Second place to the wanktastic Xeelee.