Second, this isn't very difficult. If you set something far enough in the future you can say that just about anything has happened and gloss over the details. You can say humans evolved a second head if you go far enough and I'll suspend disbelief for your story. Seriously, a space faring race forget their planet of origin? Very easy to imagine, especially if something happens to that planet of origin (like a devastating war) to cut off communication. A hundred things could happen, really.

If you look at planets from a perspective of resources, Earth is already been raped of most of the things humans use to survive. Oil will eventually run out, and metals will become harder and harder to reach. So it would stand to reason, that as humans migrate across the stars, Earth would loose importance. Why do we need Earth now? It's all we got. Once we bridge the gap to other livable worlds that have new resources to use, Earth looses importance. And if you jump a millenium or two in the future...well, I could believe that Earth could be forgotten. We are out towards the edge of the galaxy, so Earth would not be a place someone would want to go unless they had need. Once Earth lacks resources to be a prime world, then over time people wouldn't bother traveling to it at all.

Unless we slag this planet, there will always be reasons to come here. If not for the nice beaches, for the unique solar eclipses.

In case you needed more...lol:

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Generation ship where only certain few know the truth and keep it from the rest.

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Aurthur C. Clarke's "Songs of Distant Earth" used this one well.

I'll go ahead and put in my own suggestion. The early human experiments with FTL navigation were one way only, like it relied on a giant "stargate" built out at one of the Lagrange points or something. You could make communication two way or have it be one way as well. After a number of colonies have been established are are self sufficient but long before any are ready to build their own stargates, political instability on Earth results in a world war and the stargate is blown up.

The colonies undergo their own transitions with the sudden cessation of support and contact from Earth, most survive, but it ends up being millenia before even the most advanced are ready to build their own stargates (or starships that don't depend on a fixed installation). Astronomical data on Sol (and Earth) has been completely unimportant for all that time, and is also drowned in a sea of triva and outright fictions about Earth. Since we would probably aim to colonize stars quite similar to Sol anyway, it would be easy enough for a post-apocalyptic Earth to simply seem like a failed colony to anyone visiting it who didn't already know it was the planet of origin.

If you want Earth to simply stay lost so that none of the colonies ever finds it, then just have the colonies established on worlds with "softer" radiation G5's to G8's rather than G2s (assuming that the colonized planets didn't start out with an ozone layer or anything like that, it would make a lot of sense to colonize softer stars). Additionally, III's and IV's are reasonably abundant and have larger habitable margins than V's (Sol is G2V). So it might even be that only crackpots insist on believing putative original sources that class Sol as a G2V, thus ensuring that nobody even checks Sol to see if it has a habitable planet (interstellar is still too expensive for cranks, and even if it weren't, there are plenty of G2V's to waste time checking out).

"The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us."

We call ourselves civilized. People think that going to church and donating to the poor qualifies them as good people, it still doesn't change the fact that millions of people are needlessly dying each year from poverty, disease, or violence.

Hell the self-proclaimed leader of the free world disguises murder and greed with the term freedom or terrorist. The human race makes me sick, I hope an alien species wipes us out before we manage to leave Earth.

As for the original topic. Have you concidered another race? You say the enemy of humans is looking for earth, but what if there is a 4th alien race that joins against the humans...but knows where the humans originated from?

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- One of my more... outspoken characters in my second book idea, who eventually gets killed by an angry mob who can't handle the cold truth.

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You know, it's interesting that people who think that way like to imagine that they are in constant danger from angry mobs who "can't handle the cold truth." Especially since not very many people would still think that way if they were ever in real danger.

Anyway, back to the subject. Kalvin, have you ever read any of John Ringo's something or other books? Yeah, that was real clear, wasn't it?

The ones about aliens enlisting humans to fight a war for them against some other alien invaders, anyway. The alien civilization doing the asking is dominated politically by one species, and they can foresee that if they let humans join their civilization, it won't take too long for it to be the humans who'll be running the show. So they're trying to get help they really need (cause they're completely incompetent about war), but they're also trying to arrange things to make sure that most of the human race get's killed off in the process.

Of course, I can't think of a better recipie to ensure your own eventual genocide, humans are surprisingly vengeful about little things like having their race brought to the edge of extinction. But it's a mistake that humans themselves have made often enough in the past.

So you really have to do two things. First, you have to send people a long ways away from Sol, far enough that they can't just look up and see it in the night sky as a prominent star. This basically requires FTL travel. Second, you have to take away the colonists' space capabilities, meaning that none of them can have starships or starship crews. You need your colonists to be hard working sod-busters, with no real practical use for knowledge about the astronomical position of Sol (and thus Earth).

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Of course there is another idea. Basically, what it is about, is that Humans have been assisting one race that has fought against another race for ages... What happens is: The race being attacked by the humans goes to (former) earth, hoping to find a weapon to use against the humans (Which is the more powerful of the two races). If they do, then they can destroy the humans. Also, Only the race that has gone to earth knows that it -is-, in fact, earth. The other two only think that the race is attempting to flee.
Also, I haven't quite figured out if they will find a weapon or not.... I figure that if they don't, the readers will feel like they wasted there time. But, if they do, well.... I don't know exactly what I could say is a weapon capable of being used against the human race. Then again,it doesn't have to be a massive weapon. Just a new type of bullet that they hadn't discovered yet or soemthing. Opinions much appreciated.

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For one thing, I don't even believe in the rather inane notion that this happened with islands and so forth to any meaningful extent. And trying to translate that kind of scenario into interstellar space travel....

Besides, all it takes is for one ship to not crash-land for all the colonies to retain knowledge of Earth. You must get rid of interstellar navigation entirely in one fell swoop, or humans will still know about Earth. It's that simple.

I'm not saying that my initial idea is the only idea. For instance, you could have all the ships controlled by a single agency, "Starfleet". Then a hyper-isolationist government comes into power and recalls the starships and persons with knowledge of astro-cartography, and destroys all colonial records that give explicit information on Earth. Whether because of paranoia that aliens could stumble across one of the colonies and thus learn strategic information about Earth, because they have religious/mystical objections to star travel, or simply because the director of Starfleet didn't want to be the new president's mistress, you can make up whatever reason you like. And if you get the reader to buy something that silly happening (which shouldn't be difficult if the reader is a student of human history), then selling the idea that something very bad happened to wipe out the human population of Earth (or at least reduce it back to the stone age, both in numbers and technology).

Or you could have some kind of experiment with a new stardrive go awry such that hyperspace/warp/other FTL medium travel to and from Sol became fatal. The limited number of starships all jump back to find out why their communications are cut off, and they all die (along with all the astronomers off Earth). Earth undergoes some kind of catastrophic collapse, either because of the results of the accident (like if most people knew at least one close friend living in another system), or from unrelated causes (or the same causes underlying the decision to perform such a risky experiment so close to Earth itself).

I'm not particular how, but you simply have to get rid of the starships and astronomers, or it will be impossible to simply lose the Solar system (unless somebody moves it, you could have the novel stardrive accidentally transport Sol and everything within a lightyear or two somewhere else, wreaking havoc with all the advanced technology in the process).

(Edited because I couldn't even figure out what I wrote. )