My Stellaris empires always end up starting more like the vulcans with a focus on science and mostly peaceful exploration, and end up a society of soul-crushing academia that will compromise their own sanity, values and safety for any chance at powerful or dangerous knowledge, ruling over a collection of random protectorates that they maintain for little reason other than diplomatic influence and to have someone to lord their vastly supervisor tech over.
Far less friendly, aliens in my empires tend to get marginalized to basic resource planets and banned from growing their population because my primary species is more optimized for research output. Also my most common ascension path is bio-ascension, which federation humans would find very illegal since it’s primarily genetic augmentation.
I mean, isn’t the entire concept of the Fermi paradox that given the universe is so large and old, it seems surprising that we see no signs of aliens anywhere, and therefore some explanation must exist for why we have not? That’s more focused on intelligent life than extraterrestrial life of any sort I suppose, but given it’s even named a paradox in the first place, someone must find it surprising
Peace is too much effort. Suffer in silence. (startrek.website)
"Earth-like" (startrek.website)