There's an innumerable number of reasons no one showed up, only one of which is that backwards time travel isn't possible.
this post was submitted on 26 May 2024
32 points (94.4% liked)
Science Memes
10970 readers
2127 users here now
Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
- Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
- Keep it rooted (on topic).
- No spam.
- Infographics welcome, get schooled.
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
Research Committee
Other Mander Communities
Science and Research
Biology and Life Sciences
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- !reptiles and [email protected]
Physical Sciences
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
Humanities and Social Sciences
Practical and Applied Sciences
- !exercise-and [email protected]
- [email protected]
- !self [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
Memes
Miscellaneous
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
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.
Take that back!!
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.
It's by far the most plausible but sure, if you ignore Ockham's razor, sure, it's only one of many explanations
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.
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?
Hawking 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.
It would have been really awkward for everyone involved if someone stumbled into his party by mistake and freaked him out.
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
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.
[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!
I'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.
Good place to start.
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.
They want you to believe that nobody showed up.
They did not, bc the real party was somewhen else entirely...
The problem is he only told us when it was, but not where.
He did divulge the location afterwards.
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?
My theory is, time travel is possible but humanity went extinct before we got to that point.