Potential Sequel idea?
I had an interesting thought just now. If both Erid and Earth noticed that Tau Ceti wasn’t dimming, and both Erid and Earth were populated by life seeded from Adrian, with complex societies… how many more were there that saw Tau Ceti, or better yet saw that Sol and 40Eridani were brightening back to normal levels.
So could there be potentially dozens of other alien civilizations in the local group, all descended from Adrian life, all coming to Sol and 40Eridani to ask for the solution? If I were an alien civilization, I’d go to the stars that were brightening again because that would imply life around their systems already figured the problem out.
What if in the sequel Grace decides to finally go back home in his old age, and Rocky and some other Eridians joined him, after expanding the ship with some Eridian biosphere attachments and larger fuel tanks, and on the way out of the 40 Eridani system they bump into more aliens from other systems and get sidetracked into helping them?
We could have a side plot of some Eridians who went to Earth to set up communications and an embassy or something long before Grace decided to set out, so they are already arriving when the story starts, and they have to deal with helping earth out of all the problems it’s gone through in the nearly 30 years of decreasing stability, as well as new aliens arriving at Earth to ask for help on top of everything else.
I doubt this is how a sequel would go but I thought it made for an interesting idea that seems plausible by the facts established in universe.
I put this as book discussion because I doubt a second movie will be made until a second book is released and Andy Weir has toyed with the idea, and I think this plot though unlikely works in the book setting as well, even if Grace would be like 70 by the time it was over.