Time Travel

Stephen Hawking’s Memorial Service Welcomes Time Travelers

It’s an established fact that time travelers are kind of rude.

They’re always leaving their stuff lying around, or teasing everyone with vague information about the future. In 2009, they didn’t even bother to visit Stephen Hawking, after he went and invited them all to his birthday party. Terrible.

Unfortunately, Stephen Hawking passed away on March 14, 2018 at the age of 76. As far as we know, he never made contact with time travelers, and our reality hasn’t yet been overwritten to change that. But Hawking’s family and the Stephen Hawking Foundation are giving any time travelers out there one last chance to put right what once went wrong.

In this worldline, anyway.

According to BBC News, the apparent “invitation” to time travelers initially went unnoticed. Organizers of the June 15 Westminster Abbey service are making 1,000 tickets available to the public through a ballot. According to a statement, “Successful applicants will be selected at random from all entries received.”

However, if you pay close attention, there’s something very peculiar about that ballot: The section where you enter your date of birth allows for any date up to December 31, 2038.

While this could be a technical issue, a Stephen Hawking Foundation spokesman told the BBC, “We cannot exclude the possibility of time travel as it has not been disproven to our satisfaction. All things are possible until proven otherwise.”

For now, however, it doesn’t appear any chrononauts have submitted an application. They have a few more days to do so. That said, given what we know about these reckless temporal wanderers, I wouldn’t get your hopes up.

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Rob Schwarz

Writer, blogger, and part-time peddler of mysterious tales. Editor-in-chief of Stranger Dimensions.