There is a dangerous appeal to being the last. Maybe we do violence to the future so that the present won’t outlive us. Then perhaps the lack of visitors from the future does not disprove time travel (as Hawking would have it) but reveals their profound disappointment in us. Why put in so much effort to cross the timeline, if you are going only to upbraid your predecessors for being themselves… that is, silly, selfish, stupid humans:
“With the end of the world, or the world as you knew it, there were many things we had to do before we could start over. You left quite a mess. Lots of junk and lots of bodies. There’s a lot of talk, blaming you, speculating why you acted as you did. But there will be people in our future, and they will say the same things about us. I know because you said the same things about your antecedents.
“They want me to tuck this missive away, put it where it will find its way back to you. As though one day, we will wake up, and the skies will be clear, the ground clean, as though it were possible to change the course of the world.”
