One aspect that I am fascinated with in Project Hail Mary is the... "Anti Dark Forest" vibes it has. Especially with the Panspermia lore, it makes it look like encountering a new life form is reuniting with a long lost relative.
Instead of thinking space is silent because nobody wants to be annihilated by another society, it makes it more melancholic; we've just lost our space travel ability to find out what our siblings from other stars have become. But it could still happen somehow.
It's never a subject I see when people talk about what a possible sequel would be about, but I hope it'd be further in the future, about the Earth-Erid friendship and the Panspermia event. About controlling the astrophage population on other stars and making a phylogenetic tree that spreads across an entire arm of the Milky Way.
