[Mass Effect] Would the Reapers've ignored Earth if we never found the Charon Relay?

Yes, Earth would have been ignored. And that's one of the greatest tragedies of the recent cycle.

Races that have not unlocked mass effect technology, and thus have made their mark on the galaxy and ingrained their entire society with the Reaper trap are ignored. One of the things that made the other races so suspicious or hateful of humans was our ability to expand in so many ways so quickly. In a matter of decades, we jumped ahead centuries technologically, carved out a sizable chunk of the galaxy, and were pushing for a council seat ahead of species that had been part of the galactic community for hundreds of years.

Without discovering the Prothean archives or the Charon relay, humans would have been stuck in our home system, ignorant of the wider galaxy, and trying to solve problems that mass effect technology was designed to solve. Humans would have been ignored both because we weren't ready, and the fact our technology hadn't been fully saturated with the Reaper trap, thus leaving us totally vulnerable to their tactics. (not that a species so limited would have been able to fight back anyway)

It likely that if the discovery had happened just a few decades later, humans would have become one of the first species to expand into a recently-harvested galaxy, and could have risen to become the oldest and most powerful races of the next cycle. And given that a human was responsible for stopping the reapers once and for all, it's possible that a humanity given several millennia to advance might have been able to halt the reapers without so much bloodshed and tragedy.

/r/AskScienceFiction Thread