@tenyariI've got a lot of 'notes for the setting' as I'm writing a set of 5+ stories so far. Notes for things that go way beyond what the stories will ever cover as the stories I'm writing are meant to be non-serious erotic light comedy.
But in the notes...
Heavily inwork, These ideas get remade with each part of the story I get through... This is the 'under the hood' stuff that would likely drive away the kinds of readers I want, if I wrote this out in story form in the middle of a 'My New neighbor is a Naked Green Alien Girl' voyuer / exhib story... :P
Somewhere way across the galaxy a few million years ago there was a civilization much like ours, only a bit further along. Like us they ignored climate and environment in favor of wealth and power. Like us greed blocked political solutions.
Their planet died, slowly. In that time, they moved into their solar system and stopped caring - the profit was too good, the elites had power, there were enough boots on the necks of the masses, so why did a homeworld matter?
A few centuries later, greed and power got in the way again. A Warp Drive is something even modern day real world physicists know how to make. The problem is that to warp a spec of dust from 'here' to 'there' requires the mass/energy of the entire known plus unknown universe. There's no way around this. Space... will just be slower than FTL unless you find a way to devour multiple universes with each jump.
Or... you can ignore all that because you're a tech billionaire who thinks they know everything and has the wealth and power to try and strap an engine onto the sun and make a go...
Goodbye sun. One failed grab for power later, and the sun is on a one way path to a super nova. It's time to get the F out. Physicists will tell you that if you drop the right amount of Iron into the right depth of a star, you can collapse it's fusion capability - and it will start to nova.
All the wealthy elites and powerful people take all the good resources and pre-made tech and ships and flee. Leaving 90% of the population behind. None of those elites will make it - they forget that when a star Novas, it does so at light speed, and wipes out everything within a few to a thousand light years as the explosion's impact spreads.
But physicists will tell you that rather than trying to outrun a Nova (which takes a LOT of advance warning given any ship going faster than 10% of Light Speed is likely impossible)... you can try and angle yourself "just right" and ride the shockwave out - letting the very thing that kills everyone who tried to escape, be your escape. It's probably mostly a doomed effort, but if you split it up - maybe one of you will make it.
My Alien's are that one. They weren't the only one, but they weren't many others.
Massive Arkships were built in the century the "Left Behind" had. They dismantled all the planets, all the asteroids, and everything that the elites had left them with - building crude 'mini-planets' as a solution to dealing with the fact that a spec of dust hitting you when you're going 10% of Light is enough to make a 'Dinosaur Ending' impact crater...
In the middle of those ships, a vast library of their knowledge, digital DNA records of everything they could get, manufacturing ability for clothes, tech, etc. and billions of embryos made by having the AI pick them for 2 criteria: half for the most genetic diversity, and half for their idea of eugenics: the best, brightest, most physically capable.
There is no such thing as a truly sentient machine. So the AI is just the best computer program they could make. With a set of instructions for what to do when it finally hits 'the target'. Each Ark ship was aimed to reach what those people believed was a system with a likely habitable world. 90% of those likely ended up in dead empty systems or the vacuum of space with no way to do anything but keep drifting until the heat death of the universe.
But our Aliens got lucky. Bizarrely so. Finding not only a habitable system. But one which in the millions of years they drifted through space... had evolved it's own native sentient species that was so close to identical it will be enough to turn many of my Aliens religious.
DNA is a thing that can rotate clockwise or counterclockwise. All DNA on Earth rotates the same way. There's a 50-50 chance anything like DNA on another world, even if made from identical molecules, could end up going the other way. The result would be a planet where you couldn't even digest single-cell organisms. By chance, my Alien's DNA goes the same way. But the molecules are different enough to cause some story problems.
Each 'Ark Ship' was put together by different groups of the Left Behind. Some of them have AIs designed to invade, some to only go for a barren world, some to go for a star with enough rocks to build their own world, and some to try and make peace and integrate in.
My Aliens are in that last group. They're on the "Hippie Ship"... :)
Our Alien's AI spent a couple million years in a hologram running around barefoot singing 'Kumbaya brothers, we're sailing off to Eden' to itself... Like those space Hippies in that one episode of Original Star Trek.
(I've got a footnote in my setting document for a possible far future story where one of the Invasion Ark ships arrives - but right now I'm into writing happy stories so that's not being explored.)
Our Ark Ship is actually un-armed. Even further, the vast library of data has no information on any weapons or military tech beyond the iron age. But the local Humans don't know this, and won't find out for about a decade. Within a century or two it will be a moot point, the 'Humans' and 'New Humans' together will have re-engineered all the missing bits of technology - but by then they'll be integrated together and have a full on archive of the history of why some tech is a bad idea - like keep your 'Space Steve Jobs' from being able to try and use the Sun to sell tickets to join him on his own personal joy ride...
When she gets close enough to our solar system, she 'hatches' a million embryos and raises the children in a VR to "Earth age 20", then pretends to destroy her sensors so she can make her 'children' think they're going into a planet blind - all part of the 'method' she was told to use for Contact.
Part of my first 2 stories is my protagonist questioning the strange choices that the AI was programmed to follow... So some of those choices are purposefully illogical to give me some 'WTF' moments. ;)
(Alternatively; she's actually truthful about not knowing what's on Earth, but this is actually harder to explain - yet it IS the explanation that's in the stories, for now.)
What it does have is a whole arsenal of flashy special effects and spooky tricks to 'scare anyone who seems like a threat'. And what it also has is instructions to hand over tech to anyone friendly, but in stages to limit social disruption, and to ensure any handoff is 'public' - so when they land in Mexico, and start giving out non-tech, they broadcast how to do it globally so no one has an advantage. They do the same thing with their biological data.
My AI is essentially packed with a bag of tricks to facilitate peaceful contact. She also has the ability to be aware of the exact location and condition of any one of them at any time. She drops her people down in progressively bigger waves.
First Contact is 5 Aliens, 20-year olds by 'Earth Human' standards (30 of their own world's years) chosen for their 'likeability' rather than expertise - one of these 5 is my principle protagonist. A month later, 10,000 people chosen to be "your friendly neighborhood Alien". A few years later they go out globally once relationships are stable... and in my Sci-Fi stories the AI reveals that she had further gifts for the new civilization that has emerged 2 centuries later. A sort of "Now that you're ready, here's how you do those Dyson Spheres and so on" that I will figure out the nature of, if and when my stories explore that part of my setting.
My AI plays a role as a sometimes helpful, sometimes in the way 'tangent character' in my stories. She has specific plans for how to help her people survive, but they favor the collective group more often than the individual - which I use as a point of tension at times.
My AI's choice of places to send her people are all based on 'will they be able to get along, grow families, mix in with the locals, and be able to not get dragged into 'native political conflicts'.
(A main reason to avoid places like the US, Russia, and China is so that none of here people will be set against each other for at least the near future.)