There's no way he'd know that he'd be outed posthumously as an Epstein Island visitor, and thus no one in the future would want to go meet him in the past.
Maybe, but I imagine connected people knew something was up with that island. I remember hearing about the "Lolita Express" plane in maybe the early 2000s on the Internet. At the time I probably thought it was a conspiracy theory, but that it reached common people like me indicates that if you're actually going there, you'd have some questions.
He was mentioned in a 2015 email but the allegations that led to the email haven't been released in full and so it's entirely possible that it was said to discredit the accuser, and the pictures meant to show him "at an underage orgy" are from a not poorly-attended science conference which I'd expect would be too big to keep anything shady hidden, but this is the best source I could find on it: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/01/04/jeffrey-epstein-stephen-hawking-court-files-claims/
Hadn't heard about that before, so I googled it. It says Hawking visited for a physics conference discussing "what is gravity" with other Nobel prize winners. Epstein offered a reward to whoever could prove Hawking didn't participate in an underage orgy, and I don't know what that's about
The name of the late Cambridge physicist was included in a 2015 email in which Epstein told Maxwell to offer a reward to any of Giuffre’s “friends acquaitonts [sic] family” who could prove false an allegation that Hawking had participated in an “underage orgy” in the Virgin Islands. Hawking, who died in 2018, has not been accused of a crime related to Epstein.