There’s an innumerable number of reasons no one showed up, only one of which is that backwards time travel isn’t possible.
One of which is that Stephen Hawking threw a lousy party.
The other one is that most people haven’t herd of it, so I doubt the knowledge of this party will travel that far into the future.
Someone who put work and effort into developing time travel will have heard of it. Unless it happened after a complete destruction and rebuild of civilization or two.
Maybe Stephen Hawking sent hate mail to future humans so now they don’t attend his party out of spite.
Or it was developed by aliens who don’t care about human history.
This makes me think of the red dwarf episode where they find a Time Machine 3 million years into deep space, and use it to go back to the 15th century. They get disappointed and think it failed because they are still in deep space, and Kryten says no, it worked, we are now in 15th century deep space.
They then work out that you need both a Time Machine and an instant space travel machine like the holly hop drive. Especially since everything in the universe is moving.
And so, like, aliens might very well care but can’t find the right intersection of time and space to actually get there. :)
We’re in one of the unlucky few possible resulting timelines in which no one showed. My friend from timeline 3f-1933847.12b told me that their party is still going. Every few hours more travelers turn up with a fresh keg, and whatever their generation’s party drug is.
Maybe future people knew about his supposed ties to Epstein and didn’t want to show up…
For example maybe you need a working time machine at your destination, such that the earliest point possible to travel to is the moment the first time machine was switched on.
One of them that no one made a backup of the past.
News of his attendance at someone else’s party made all future time travelers give him a wide berth.
They want you to believe that nobody showed up.
And by They, you of course mean The Globetrotters, formerly of Harlem
Hawking concluded it is impossible because nobody showed up to his party. Zero thought was spent wondering if it was a party worth showing up to.
Yeah, now that I think of it more, I can’t see a single good reason for a time traveler to show up at this party. Going back in time to prove the existence of time travel to the past has a very good chance of handing control of time travel away to people who can undo your existence without you ever being aware of it.
Even if you just wanted a conversation with one of the brilliant minds in physics, it would be smarter to pick a random lecture or non-time-travel-themed party.
Yes, or someone did show up despite knowing the risks because they trusted Hawking to understand the dangers of revealing the secret of time travel and not sharing it with any living soul. If time travel were to ever become possible and somewhat commonplace then the chances are probably close to zero that everybody chooses not to attend this party (assuming the invitation remains famous for long enough). Perhaps the party was crowded with people thinking the same way.
It’s much more likely that it all just played out exactly the way Hawking said it did, of course. But it’s a fun thought experiment to play around with.
That assumes time-travelers are smart. Never a safe assumption to make.
Good point. Just look at sovereign citizens. They travel all the time.
Correct me if I’m wrong:
I live in a timeline where time travel has not yet been invented. Even if someone invents it in the future and travels to the past to the party, that’d create an alternate timeline where the party is attended and civilization leaps bounds ahead in glorious post-scarcity, magical socialism fashion.
But nooooo since the timeline was forked at that point, no matter how many people do, in fact, attend the party, I’m stuck in the “strand” of the timeline when no one ever did because time travel has not been invented.
There’s different ideas on how time travel “could” work and one of them is the timeline-split notion upon which you base your idea. In that vain it’s solid.
Other ideas are that time travel always results in a loop or that its perhaps only possible under very specific circumstances (ie you can’t pick an arbitrary location or time to travel to nor to travel from).
My hunch is that even if time travel were possible there’s simply no practical experiment to tell whether you are in a split timeline (and if so how it differs from others), aka it’s outside of the realm of scientific // logical inquiry.
If y’all like exploration of time travel go watch the show Travelers some time. It has some interesting premises in that regard.
However, IF, your theory is accurate, then you are the prime instance of you. All time travel alternatives are just YOU in another scenario, not different versions of each other, they are all YOU.
That’s got to be worth something. 🤷🏻♂️
It’s worth something to this me! Who so far is the Prime Me!
Eh, that’s more science fiction than actual theory.
Depends on how you see it. It could also be that for some reason or another even with backwards time travel no one shows up. And thus you avoid having a paradox
Or it could be like a time portal so once you build one you an travel back to any point it existed in but one to a point where it doesn’t exist since you need time travel infrastructure
Or the technology for invisibility arrives before time travel so they were there, just undetected. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
rips bong
I mean, that for the most part makes sense. Although in that case, wouldn’t it have been reported that “no one attended the party but the food and the snacks were somehow missing”?
That said. Unsure how exactly it went but I read somewhere that if you had the power of True Invisibility, that is being undetectable at any wavelength of light, then you’d basically be able to simulate negative mass, and from there to “time travel” it’s kind of a straight line.
Bummer, I haven’t felt this sad since learning about thermodynamics.
Damn rules of thermodynamics!
you can’t win
you can’t tie
you can’t quit the game
My theory is, time travel is possible but humanity went extinct before we got to that point.
Agreed. We are wiping ourselves out.
I mean when time travel is invented the story will change and we’ll be reading about those visitors. Nobody has shown up at Hawking’s party yet.
Perhaps the time travellers came back as catering staff so they could polish it all off without having to engage in human interaction.
The problem is he only told us when it was, but not where.
He did divulge the location afterwards.
[off topic]
“The Big Time” by Fritz Leiber is one of my all time favorite novels. His time travel works on the principle of 'The Law Of Conservation Of Reality." There’s only one timeline, and it’s possible to change it, but it requires a lot of work.
If you go back and kill baby Hitler, he’ll come back to life and no one will remember anything. It takes vast armies fighting thousands of secret battles to change one thing. But when a Big Change hits, look out!
Imagine having time travel and wasting it on going to some nerd party.
I mean, it wouldn’t be like they waste any time, lol
Well, it was a party, not an orgy.
It depends on the type of time travel rules. One theory suggest going back in time creates a branch in the time-space continuum, one where the time travel happened, one where it did not.
With this branching time-space rule, there’s one timeline, where no time travellers appeared, and one where they did.
Or they found out about his time at Epstein Island and didn’t wanna fuck w that
What if time travel requires an anchor so you can’t go backwards before the time it was invented?
A party with no bitches, just some nerd who doubts your existence and would spend time asking you stupid questions? No wonder no one came…
Plus it would likely be taboo to visit the past because of how easy it’d be to spread future germs and get everyone killed.
