It's by far the most plausible but sure, if you ignore Ockham's razor, sure, it's only one of many explanations

Maybe future people knew about his supposed ties to Epstein and didn't want to show up...

And by They, you of course mean The Globetrotters, formerly of Harlem

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.

There's different ideas on how time travel "could" work and one of them is the timeline-split notion upon which you base your idea. In that vain it's solid.

Other ideas are that time travel always results in a loop or that its perhaps only possible under very specific circumstances (ie you can't pick an arbitrary location or time to travel to nor to travel from).

My hunch is that even if time travel were possible there's simply no practical experiment to tell whether you are in a split timeline (and if so how it differs from others), aka it's outside of the realm of scientific // logical inquiry.

If y'all like exploration of time travel go watch the show Travelers some time. It has some interesting premises in that regard.

Eh, that's more science fiction than actual theory.

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

Agreed. We are wiping ourselves out.

He did divulge the location afterwards.

I mean, it wouldn’t be like they waste any time, lol

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

But you did not, in the future.

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"

That theory suggest that everything that can happen, will — but even then, things that can't happen, won't.