Probe with wild abandon

Take all resources and kill the insects that are buzzing around. These “human” things

The instant we announce to the galaxy we've unlocked FTL travel, they'll send a probe to destroy the planet. Until then, they'll leave us be, we're no threat. Better that than to risk who we might be, what we might do. They learned the hard way, barely surviving, now they don't take any chances.

The real solution to the Fermi Paradox.

They'd need to know our culture if communication is an eventual goal. Assuming they have LLMs, this should be easy as we've been blasting a wide radius almost 100 lightyears.

Direct interaction would change us fundamentally and they know that, so they'd opt for a subtle approach. Probably politics with a mix of anthropology.

There's a nice short scifi novella by Chad Oliver called Blood's a Rover that explores this a little.