fossilesqueImplications
DiplomjodlerThey want you to believe that nobody showed up.
OpenStarsThey did not, bc the real party was somewhen else entirely…
Viking_HippieAnd by They, you of course mean The Globetrotters, formerly of Harlem
Globetrotters
The Globetrotters are the human descendants from the famous basketball team, the Harlem Globetrotters. For whatever reason, at some point, the Globetrotters left Earth to the Globetrotter Planet. The Globetrotters are exceptional basketball players specializing in basketball tomfoolery, who also have keen scientific minds, and have saved both the Earth and the Universe from disaster. Professor Farnsworth once created a team of Atomic Supermen to challenge the Globetrotters in a game of basketbal
It would have been really awkward for everyone involved if someone stumbled into his party by mistake and freaked him out.
JackGreenEarthThere’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.
Cosmonaut_CollinMaybe Stephen Hawking sent hate mail to future humans so now they don’t attend his party out of spite.
steal_your_faceIt came out in the future that he was a real meanie and no one likes him anymore.
All the emails that arrived in the future turned into gel bananas, so they didn’t get the memom
He wrote that one paper that called time travellers nerds. No one forgives him for that.
Or it was developed by aliens who don’t care about human history.
BubbleMonkeyThis 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 Krysten 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. :)
Take that back!!
It’s by far the most plausible but sure, if you ignore Ockham’s razor, sure, it’s only one of many explanations
More plausible than there being rules around time travel that involve not attending parties? I think not.
Tbf the important question is: assuming that backwards time travel is possible, will people attempt to the party. And there I would say, unlikely. And while I think backwards time travel is very implausible, the experiment itself proves nothing
I thought in your original reply you were saying the most plausible thing was that there must be no time travel. This reply suggests otherwise, which I agree with.
I still do not believe in time travel so I think the most plausible thing is there is no time travel. But assuming time travel was possible, there would still be no one on the party. This doesn’t prove it but neither do I need any proof
One such possibility is that you can only travel to times where the device you’re using to do so exists.
More like a time gate than an H.G. Wells-style machine, but still a workable model.
👍Maximum Derek👍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.
One of them that no one made a backup of the past.
Maybe future people knew about his supposed ties to Epstein and didn’t want to show up…
Exactly, 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.
News of his attendance at someone else’s party made all future time travelers give him a wide berth.
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.
LucidlethargyI mean, maybe people did show up. Maybe he never told anyone else due to the implications.
The problem is he only told us when it was, but not where.
He did divulge the location afterwards.
I’m planning on going!
But you did not, in the future.
Perhaps the time travellers came back as catering staff so they could polish it all off without having to engage in human interaction.
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?
In the future we develop the technology to delay all Covid-19 symptoms for 10 years upon first infection.
The bad guy would have to be the Mr Glass guy from Unbreakable, or otherwise the chase scenes would be really really short.
Hahahahaha oh man I’m going to hell for laughing at this.
Rocket wheelchair.
Nice work there.
It’s missing Harambe somewhere, but great so far
ShellMonkeySo by the thought of infinite parallel universes though, shouldn’t there then be at least some in which someone did attend?
Pi 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”
One the one hand you are correct.
On the other hand… Behold! An A in pi! www.spoj.com/problems/PIHEX2/
Haha, I figured it was 50/50 on whether I would get this comment or something about the ASCII representation of the letter A
Match!!Shower thought: Pi in base 36 contains every string of characters somewhere.
While pi is irrational, there is no guarantee every conceivable sequence of digits will be in pi. However the library of babel contains all letter sequences under a certain length.
3200 characters, using only the lowercase alphabet, space, comma, and full stop.
That theory suggest that everything that can happen, will — but even then, things that can’t happen, won’t.
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
Just because you can time travel, doesn’t still mean you don’t still age, get hungry, have limited energy to do stuff, …
me with the ability to time travel_: but I’m tired_
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.
That assumes time-travelers are smart. Never a safe assumption to make.
Good point. Just look at sovereign citizens. They travel all the time.
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.
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.
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