What If You Gave a Party for Time Travellers and No One Showed Up?

I love the idea of time travel and all the theories of it and all the fiction that has been created about it. That giant of theoretical physics, cosmology, and pop culture, Stephen Hawking, once did a simple time travel experiment. He invited time travelers to a party.

It was held on a Sunday, June 29, 2009. Hawking had a nice party room set up with champagne and food at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, beneath a banner reading, “Welcome Time Travellers” and he waited.

The party invitations gave precise GPS coordinates for the travelers. Of course, Stephen did not send out any of the invitations until after the reception had passed. That was critical to the experimental design: Only those who could travel back in time would be able to attend.

No one showed up. There is a video of the party. Canapes uneaten, flutes filled with Krug champagne untouched, balloons decorating the place and Stephen sitting in his wheelchair under that banner.

Wouldn't any future time traveler have been excited to go back and party with Hawking? 

The invitation was included in his mini-series Into the Universe With Stephen Hawking and the Discovery TV crew filmed the event just in case someone did travel back. 

Some fancy invitations were auctioned off for charity and the party got a lot of press and exists all over the Internet. “I’m hoping copies of [the invitation], in one form or another, will survive for many thousands of years,” Hawking said, considering that maybe some future time traveler will see it and decide to show up to the party. Of course, that would create a whole new timeline in one of the many possible universes out there.

So why didn't any time travelers attend? I've seen a bunch of possible reasons posited.

1. We never do figure out how to time travel because it's not possible. A bummer reason for believers.
2. Maybe people in the future who had a way to time travel just never knew about Hawking's party.
3. Despite Hawking's wishes, the invites didn't survive to the time when time travel was invented.
4. Might Stephen had lied and they did show up but he kept it secret to protect the space-time continuum?
5. Perhaps you can only travel back to the point where time travel was invented.
6. Maybe the party didn't sound all that exciting and they decided to pass on this party.
7. The blog Giant Freakin Robot came up with some other possible reasons including that the party took place on a different reality timeline;
8. “time travelers are dicks” 
9. Even if people do figure out how to time travel, they may not have precise control like Doc Brown. "Ask Dr. Sam Beckett. Ask Billy Pilgrim. Ask Fry, Bender, and Professor Farnsworth who invented a time machine that only goes forward"
10. The darker version of #4 - "Hawking killed them all to preserve the time-space continuum.”

An earlier version of this post appeared on my blog Weekends in Paradelle