How do you know when you are a newbie?

[Ed Kolis]

If you mean send population to a colony that has none, you need to load some population on a transport (any ship with cargo storage will do) and drop the population at the colony. You have to own the colony, though - you can't send population to an empty colony that someone else owns, for some reason. And you can't just dump population on a planet that NOBODY owns - that's what colony ships are for.

The spy button is located on the Empires window (click on the little white alien guy). It will be grayed out until you actually meet some other races.