Sounds like you're better off scrapping your 10+ years maintenance clock ships with your shipyards and build new ones. And if you're building the exact same kind, you can even re-use the components you got back from scrapping them.
As for aliens, they can pop up about anywhere, the type of star doesn't matter. All they need is a livable planet. Not necessarily one that fits human, mind. But unless they breath something other than oxygen, you're likely to find their homeworld to be an easy planet to terraform down to a colony cost of 0 for you.
If you don't meet enough, you could use spacemaster mode (ctrl+S) to generate a new system from the system generation window (F9). Then if there's no livable world, you can just create a new colony, terraform it a bit, abandon the colony and create a new empire that is an NPR. You'll probably meet up at some point.
Or you could go back to the Game Info screen (ctrl+I) and turn up the NPR generation rate for the player. I wouldn't recommend doing it for NPRs, they'd just end up fighting and bog down your game off screen, which makes it kinda annoying when you can't even watch the action and you're randomly down to 5 seconds turn.