Wow! The Earth is nearby.

What was a minimalist existential story of a machine becoming fully alive, and thus mad, in the barren expanse of space, has morphed into an existential crisis for all humanity.

This, in turn, makes the previously apparently innocuous decision of the machine, to have a child, a major threat to human life, since one machine may likely be benign, but millions of individually replicating machines, each with individually evolved minds, each replicating at bonkers speeds, makes the creation of a malign threat to life on Earth inevitable.

And the sheer level of research it has taken to get the details of astronomy and technology correct for this story is astonishing lol.

Bar a few typos, this is wonderful work!:0