Aliens relationship with humans

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If you put it that way, I'd say what humans have is species selection. Humans help other humans survive and members of certain other domesticated species because it benefits our species.

I was reading the wiki article on kin selection ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kin_selection ) and it says that Darwin even wrote about it in his book. He noticed the sterile worker bees.
Apparently is also another concept called group selection which is slightly different.
If any aliens manage to travel to earth they are probably social creatures of some sort. At that point they will be far more advanced than we are, so all we can do is hope they are friendly. Or maybe they will just keep us alive to study us. Or... maybe they already are and we don't know it yet?

It's impossible to apply our subjective thoughts on how a species alien to our planet would behave.

We'd be ants to whomever got here though, that's for certain.

People are mentioning Darwin here, but a more apt theory to apply here is Chaos theory. After the initial disorder created by humans encountering an alien species for the first time, there would have to be some sort of accommodation between the two species to restore order. This would entail one of the species wiping the other out, or the two species learning to live with each other.

I have a difficult time believing they would think of us as ants. If anything, they would just see us as backwards but if they observed us, they would recognize we are striving unless they are so far gone they have completely lost that side of themselves and it is meaningless to them. In that case they might think of us as ants.

Maybe. Maybe not.
Have you ever seen the film The Day The Earth Stood Still? Without wishing to give too much away, one might say it's about aliens who turn against humans because of our capacity for invention and technology etc.

I don't know where people get this notion that you need to be Sufficient Advanced in order to achieve starflight. We already have some near-term options on the table, ranging from beamed propulsion to nuclear pulse propulsion. Both of these could get us to 5-10% of the speed of light, with a magsail for slowing down. To a species with a lifespan measured in millenia (which is entirely plausible), that might be sufficient, but they could always go faster, or use hibernation. A 200ly journey could be a minor thing for them, and their colonisation wave could quickly reach Terra from the other side of the galaxy, a few million years at most.

Why is it that when people think "interstellar travel", they typically think "faster than light"?

Pragmatism. Space is vast and virtually has no end. It would take a long long time and while in the grand scheme of things you'd be correct, in the short order of things like exploration or war, time is of the essence. Unless of course the aliens were smug, but I would not expect a smug view from a militaristic society of beings. I could see it from some non-militaristic ones, but those aren't ones we'd need to worry about.

For example humans live quite a while, though we're not immortal. We live for decades when nature I guess takes it's course. However, it's quite expendable to journey like people do. If things didn't need be done faster, cars, flight, and other technologies that accommodate (including animal husbandry) wouldn't have been utilized they way they were.

Oh, so you don't mean we'd be primitive compared to everyone who might have interstellar travel, only primitive to ones that would want to wipe us out...

The furthest we've put a boot is the moon.

Going to another star is no less impressive than an ant would think of the moon trip.

They will be attracted by such small steps from man. This is what will cause them to take notice of us.

That'd be impossible to say.

An alien's motivation could be entirely out of hunger (planet eating, for example). Or it could be something existential. The possibilities are only limited by our own thoughts, which aliens aren't limited to; so who knows.