If we ever attempt interstellar travel, we’ll probably find it much easier to get somewhere than to slow down once we do.

The hard part isn’t always obvious in advance, but that’d be my guess where people/AI is likely to perish in five or ten thousand years when we give it a go.

One of my favorite producers of electronic music likes to use samples from movie dialog in his works. I usually recognize any film used in any bit of music. I’ve seen thousands of movies in many different languages and I have a very good memory, and the internet to fall back on if that fails.

Except some of his samples, I did not recognize at all. I was stumped. Even the internet offered no clues of any kind.

Then I realized that he was creating authentic-sounding “samples” from films that never existed and inserting them into the music. They seem so real that many are even in the mid-30s to mid-50s mid-Atlantic accent common to so many movies of that era.

God, so brilliant and so well-done.

Movies that existed in some alternative universe, divergent from ours, straying into music from our timeline. Great.