Generally, time travel is thought of as a negative thing. Change one thing in the past, perhaps as simple as making somebody arrive someplace a few minutes later than they should or stepping on a butterfly, and you unleash a cascade of events eventually leading to extremely negative consequences. Not to mention the high risk of creating a paradox, an event that prevents you from travelling back in time in order to create the event preventing you from doing that. It's a risky business.
But is it really all that bad? We think it is bad or impossible because we are not exactly happy with the situation of... well, pretty much everything right now. If someone could change the situation by going back in time and altering events, they'd probably have done it, perhaps prevented Bieber from becoming a hit, and we wouldn't feel so bad. Or would we?
Suppose there has been a time traveller. Suppose that time traveller averted a huge catastrophe. We wouldn't know. Suppose he increased our life quality significantly. We wouldn't know. We would still be stuck in our ways of complaining about Status Quo. When we do not know what we've lost, we can't know what we're gained. In a way, it is the reason why the Doctor is so little know within the people who have not yet quite grasped time travel in its entirety.
The main problem with time travel though is getting back. If you go to the past, you will have inherently changed it and the future you will go back to will no longer be the same. Keeping the machine with you could also be found slightly problematic - this would mean that the distortion field is outside the time machine, not inside. Even if you don't want to come back, you don't want somebody else coming after you or messing up your plans using your machine. And when you've solved that problem, you are still in a strange time where you have to survive somehow. That ain't easy.
Time travel poses many problems, but whatever you do, there's a pretty slim chance anyone will ever find out about it.
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