Context: He's in the files
this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2026
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What are the chances that visiting Steven Hawking is the most interesting/fun thing you can do, if you could freely time travel? I'd much rather go look at dinosaurs, or visit the construction of the pyramids, or go listen to Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech.
Even if my goal was to meet a single scientist, I think I'd personally pick any other. Pliny the Elder, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein...
Not to be rude to Mr. Hawking (well, maybe he deserves it, I don't know what got him in to the Epstein files...), but a thorougly average party is simply not likely to attract very many time travellers.
Not only that, apparently the machine he used to speak was rather difficult to use quickly, and drafting responses could take hours or days depending on how much needed said. Pretty much all of his appearances after he was unable to use his voice were heavily scripted ahead of time.
So unless you're visiting Steven Hawking when he still could talk, it'd be pretty boring as you couldn't have a proper back-and-forth conversation
I think his party would attract at least a few curiosity seekers.
On the other hand, it would likely include time travellers from various future eras, perhaps hundreds, or even thousands of years apart. Future time travel would have to be heavily regulated, to keep unauthorized people from screwing up the time line. So perhaps future time travellers are expressly forbidden from having contact with other time travellers, making Hawking's party the one place that time travellers are NOT allowed to visit.
That all depends on what time travel theory ends up being correct. There's the one where it's all the same timeline, and there's the one where you spawn a new universe by traveling back and making changes.
So, a person traveling back might not be impacting the future they left.
It would be a real bitch to try and coordinate a party with multiple time travelers with the forking system. Each one might end up as the only traveler in their new universe. Unless they carpooled, I guess.