The DU Lounge

As we learned in Back to the Future II, when you change the past can cause an alteration to the timeline. If you go back in time, you automatically affect the environment around you causing a disruption in the space-continuum timeline. If you go forward in time, you disrupt that timeline because you originally wouldn't have been there. The danger of time travel is too great to do.

If you could travel in time then I'd opt for going back in time provided you could only observe and not interact or influence anyone or anything. It would be like opening a window and watching what was happening. It would be interesting to see not only the persons involved in some of history's most important events but to see and examine what people did that lead up to and caused the event to fully understand what and why something happened. Seeing into the future through a "time bubble" would allow us, in our time period, to advance our civilization faster than we'd be able to handle it. It would be like introducing what our society has to those in the 1700s. Eventually, they'd be able to handle it but the disruptions it would cause to society's natural progression would cause them to develop differently, either for the better or the worse.