How Did You Decide the Personality for the Milky Way?

The Milky Way is more than 10 billion years old. Most of that time it's been really lonely. It spent all of its time creating stars, then feeling guilty that those stars inevitably have to die for the galaxy to continue in its current form. If we are looking for aliens like us that need planets that have stable orbits around their stars, we're probably not going to find them in the bulge of the Milky Way.