I can't believe he didn't write that one.

The movie Vanilla Sky, the anime series Scrapped Princess, and the X-files episode The Post-Modern Prometheus have one thing in common (besides being worth watching): They show so much of the handwriting (plot devices, idiosyncracies in dialogue, characterization, setting...) of individual authors that it's hard to believe they aren't based on actual works by those authors.
Vanilla Sky's easy to guess, but can you guess the other ones? Vernor Vinge, and Bob Sheckley, respectively.

In my eyes, though, that doesn't make them rip-offs. More kind of an hommage.

Why Is There Anything, Rather Than Nothing At All ?

In the last few years, algorithmic information theory and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics have given me a sort of half-baked intuition that we, as a civilization, have the concept of nothingness wrong. To me, nothingness means the lack of any specification, or description, or restriction, and therefore implies the plenitude of all possible forms of existence. A void, a vacuum, utter silence, a blank slate, is something that needs to be described, or specified. I can't put it any better than that currently, but somehow the question why the "universe" exists seems a bit like an un-question to me now; it's the result of the complete absence of restrictions to existence. This lack of restriction, or description, seems to me the most natural, intuitive, or simple state imaginable.