There's an innumerable number of reasons no one showed up, only one of which is that backwards time travel isn't possible.
118We'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.
26Maybe future people knew about his supposed ties to Epstein and didn't want to show up...
8Exactly, they'd know a lot more accurately what happened too, which raises another point as to why no one comes back here - imagine gong somewhere that you know horrible things are happening to children but you can't say anything or save them because of the timeline..
Even if in the unlikely event Hawking didn't know about it talking to him and not saying 'that friend of yours epstine is a bad dude' would be unbearable.
2
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.
4One of them that no one made a backup of the past.
3I mean, maybe people did show up. Maybe he never told anyone else due to the implications.
2News of his attendance at someone else's party made all future time travelers give him a wide berth.
2
Can you imagine if someone showed up and his party became ground zero for a worldwide pandemic of future diseases for which we don't have cures yet?
69Hawking gets a Covid sample from a time traveler in 2009 and immediately travels to the Wuhan lab to study it and look for a cure, he successfully delays the pandemic and he almost gets to a cure but a bad guy time traveler comes to kill him in 2018 and without the watchful eye of Stephen Hawking, the world falls to chaos.
I'd watch that movie.
63
They want you to believe that nobody showed up.
62They did not, bc the real party was somewhen else entirely...
21And by They, you of course mean The Globetrotters, formerly of Harlem
13
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.
49Yeah, 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.
25Yes, 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.
12
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.
38There'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.
21There is also the harry potter version, any time travel is woven into the only timeline. The past is "edited" to always have included the events time travel.
This can be considered similar to the branching method; where the original branch without the events of the time travel simply ends; only the "new" branch continues.
2
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. 🤷🏻♂️
12It's worth something to this me! Who so far is the Prime Me!
2
Eh, that's more science fiction than actual theory.
8Depends 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
5Bummer, I haven't felt this sad since learning about thermodynamics.
3Damn rules of thermodynamics!
you can't win
you can't tie
you can't quit the game
3
My theory is, time travel is possible but humanity went extinct before we got to that point.
29Agreed. We are wiping ourselves out.
7
The problem is he only told us when it was, but not where.
23He did divulge the location afterwards.
37
Perhaps the time travellers came back as catering staff so they could polish it all off without having to engage in human interaction.
19I'm planning on going!
16But you did not, in the future.
14
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.
15That's the point though. It doesn't matter when time travel is invented, only if it can be invented.
If time travel is possible even 10 000 years in the future someone would almost certainly show up at Hawking's party since they have a time machine.
The fact that no one showed up it's a reasonable argument that time travel is impossible
9That's like somebody saying in 1912 that fax machines could never be invented because no printouts were magically appearing on their desk. The technology had to be invented before it could be used. If a time traveler has to step out of a machine, that machine has to be invented first. The idea is that backwards time travel would only be able to travel as far back as the invention of backwards time travel.
That being said, from a physics standpoint I can absolutely see backwards time travel as being impossible. We can't move negative distances across spatial dimensions, so why would we be able to move backwards in time?
2
Well, it was a party, not an orgy.
13[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!
10I've never read any Fritz Leiber, but he's cited as a major influence by Zelazny (and Butcher, Donaldson, Stephenson, etc.)
Maybe today is the day I dig up and start reading Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser.
3Good place to start.
2
So by the thought of infinite parallel universes though, shouldn't there then be at least some in which someone did attend?
6Pi is an infinite series of non-repeating digits, and yet you will never find the letter A in pi because there is a 0% chance of the letter A being a digit in a decimal system. By the same logic, infinite possibilities do not guarantee that every conceivable state occurs, if that conceivable state has a 0% probability. As finite beings, it is very difficult for us to accurately distinguish between a 0% probability and a infinitesimal probability, so we end up circling back to "we don't know"
30One the one hand you are correct.
On the other hand... Behold! An A in pi! https://www.spoj.com/problems/PIHEX2/
8
That theory suggest that everything that can happen, will — but even then, things that can't happen, won't.
6
Or they found out about his time at Epstein Island and didn't wanna fuck w that
6I'd crash the party to accuse him of that.
1Hawking: I literally talk with my cheek muscles, wtf
3
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.
6A 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.
5So you are apparently a time traveler from the past who still uses "bitches" to refer to women. A quick update, in this time and age this is considered sexist and you might want to get up to date with other expressions as well
5
How would any time travelers have known about his party? Did he advertise it? Or did he assume he would invent the time machine? Maybe time travelers just went to a much cooler party where there were drugs and people other than Stephen Hawking.
3He publicised the invite after he hosted it
15Time travelers were fashionably late by 2 decades. They thought they had time.
2
What if time travel requires an anchor so you can't go backwards before the time it was invented?
2Well, given what we have learned about Hawking, it's not that shocking. Also, why would they reveal themselves like that.
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