The devs have stated that there will be no NPCs whatsoever, everyone from shopkeeps to pirates will all hopefully be players.
However, there is probably gonna be a variety of environmental hazards, such as environments that damage exposed components or asteroid fields to avoid crashing into. In the alpha, the asteroid belt has been less of an issue for me to navigate personally, as long as you are watching where you're flying you won't hit anything, although I did go AFK once and crashed my favourite mining ship, I still haven't gotten around to repairing it...