Stephen Hawking posited that the first and only thing a time machine would do is detonate as a direct consequence of virtual particles reaching arbitrarily high

Stephen Hawking posited that the first and only thing a time machine would do is detonate as a direct consequence of virtual particles reaching arbitrarily high energy density through repeated loops. If you don’t like various chronology protection conjecture, fair enough, but building a time machine means something unless you’re inserting magic into it. Our universe appears to lack the necessary extreme curvature or negative mass to sustain CTC’s. In the absence of such natural curvature or means to create it artificially and stabilize it, the whole question is a non-starter.