What came to my mind reading through it was just to make sure that what the alien cultures have preserved doesn't neatly and perfectly fit together, both in mythology and in technology. You wouldn't want it to seem overly simple, and you don't want to make it seem silly that no one's ever just come and put this together beforehand.
For the mythology, you have an opportunity to to make everyone equally wrong. Or have something that sounds very compelling and seems to mesh nearly with existing knowledge about the 'truth', but turns out to be incorrect when faced with more solid evidence. And remember that it's okay to balance the eventual reveal and payoff with some mysteries left unsolved. Leave little things that don't get answered, and it'll make the answers for the big things feel more valuable.
For the technology, the same basic advice would apply. It might end up a little too easy if they just push their preserved systems together and they start churning out factories, so feel free to toss troubles in their way—materials might be missing that would be trivial if the planet was still modernized, but which require cooperation between peoples who have been at war for the past few years. Or maybe one of the pieces of technology they'd need to remodernize the planet is missing, and it takes...sacrifice? Ingenuity of a talented alien? Cobbling together something that can do the job long enough that they can make an actual replacement? Just a thought, to mix up the structure of that formula a little.
But yeah, generally make sure that the world feels like a world realistically fallen into ruin, and let the puzzle to be fit together emerge from that world, don't be afraid to let your characters come to conclusions that turn out wrong, just stuff like that. Sounds fairly interesting, I have to say!
One last note though that I thought of while looking at this is what sense of time we're working with here. Is there FTL travel/communication? Like for instance, considering a travel time of 20 years for the probes to get to the world (2027-2047) and an identical travel time for the signal sent back to Earth (2047-2067), that would mean that between leaving Earth in 2067 and arriving in 2087, there'd be forty years between visual contact with an advanced race and a reversion to pre-industrial culture and cargo cults. But, for instance, I suppose we could say that the highly advanced optics in the first probe are able to image planets in the visible spectrum from light-years away (which is actually not that theoretically far off) and that they see the planet from 100 light-years away, and still working with a vantage point 20 light-years from Earth, that would mean they'd be seeing the planet as it was 120 years ago, and the probes (at light-speed travel) reach the planet after another 120 years, giving it 240 years to have declined. However you want to work the times and distances, just be sure that they match up with an appropriate timeline for what happened to the world.
(Damn, that was supposed to be a short footnote.)
By 2025 KEPLER found a multitude of extra-solar planets which based on what the observatory/spacecraft could discern had all the right conditions for life to emerge. Two years later probes were sent to observe these worlds and transmit what they found. In 2067 the images from one of these worlds (for which I have as of yet no name) were received back on Earth astonishing everyone. There it found not only life, but an alien civilization.
After much deliberation the Global Union decided to send another probe, but this time for the purpose of contact. To this end NOMAD and SPIRIT were created; both equal in capacities to human minds yet geared to radically different circumstances. Space is after all vast, beautiful and empty to the point where most human minds would quickly go mad of loneliness and despair were they to be left adrift in the void. NOMAD was created to endure the void; a tough, determined loner who would do whatever it took to get the job done.
As soon was apparent during the mission's planning stage, such a personality would be counterproductive during the contact stage. There it was clear the ability to get along with beings very different from oneself took priority. That was SPIRIT's task. And so off they were sent; an odd couple on an interstellar voyage trying hard not to kill one another before the mission is complete. By the time the duo got there, however, the alien civilization they had come to contact was no longer the advanced technological society that was shown by the exploration probe that found it. After a long and intensive search they discovered that the inhabitants of ——- have reverted to a pre-agricultural standard of living. In order to find out how and why all of this came to be SPIRIT must overcome a number of obstacles:
1.A complex web of espionage between several different alien societies; each has preserved through it's mythology part of the solution to the unfolding mystery, each has preserved through it's own cargo cult one of the technologies necessary to start a premature industrial revolution.
2. The local flora and fauna, which after the end of the technological civilization that was has reclaimed most of the world.
So what do you think? Is there anything I need to work on in particular?
edited 8th Jun '12 6:56:14 PM by goldenerasuburb