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.
Eh, that’s more science fiction than actual theory.
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
There’s an innumerable number of reasons no one showed up, only one of which is that backwards time travel isn’t possible.
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 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.
They want you to believe that nobody showed up.
They did not, bc the real party was somewhen else entirely…
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.
That’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
That’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?
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.
