This kind of sad romantization of physical phenomena is weird to me.
I think romanticizing physical phenomena can be a really great tool to create a narrative and get people interested in the subject, or can just be a cool talking point about physics.
This example is pointless and kinda sad
If a photon from the sun misses the earth it will likely travel for billions of years into the void, most of them probably absorbed by random space dust. So hitting earth or hitting a human could be considered cool depending how you sell the narrative.
It's possible to tell many different narratives. I just dislike the sad ones. There are many more cool ones
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