I would argue that it is wrong to fuck with the time stream, though it depends on the situation. "What about going into the past and stopping Hitler?" I hear you say. Well sure, you could do that. But despite that being the stereotypical, some would say "correct", response to the question "what you would do if you got to time travel?" it also poses a few problems that make it totally not worth the risk. So you go back in time and kill Hitler as a baby. Great! You just prevented millions of deaths! You are a hero! That is, unless someone worse than Hitler rises to power in his place, then you may have caused more deaths and as such are now a monster yourself. What if you have grandparents that met due to the turbulence caused by the war? Wouldn't you have never been born? What if by preventing world war 2 you prevented, or at least delayed, certain inventions that became life saving? On that list some things that only got invented because we wanted to be better at killing people, and at the same time prevent our own people from dying. These may have come about eventually, but how many lives would be lost in the interim? What about paradoxes? If you solve a problem in the past what reason would you have had to go back and correct it? If you didn't go back and correct it how did it get corrected and so on. We don't know if/how these would affect the process of time travel, but they are potentially fucked up.
It is a classic trope that time travel has unintended consequences. If you believe in a time stream that is mutable, then going back in time can have massive effects on the future. Most people have heard of the butterfly effect (or saw the kind of crappy movie): that a small change, or set of small changes even, will compound into bigger changes down the line. Even if you don't change something when you go to the past your presence there is something that didn't happen. You displace air. You breath out bacteria that may be fatal to the environs. You shed genetic material in the form of skin and hair cells. We have no idea how this would mess with the future. The introduction of small changes into a system can gum up the whole works. And, If you believe in a timeline in which nothing can be changed, or at the very least that certain major events are predestined, going back in time changes nothing, so trying to change the past becomes a useless action. In your defense though, going back in time to observe in that type of timeline to observe events in history, that would be invaluable, but mostly due to the lack of world ending possibilities. The problem here, however would be finding a way to be certain that time really is an absolute. Which brings us back around to really bad idea territory.
As for the other direction, going to the future starts the same problem. By going into the future and grabbing information or tech and using that in the past, it may cause a paradox because depending on what it is/how you use it, you might prevent it from being made. Paradoxes aside you might just fuck up the general future anyway by causing turmoil now. Since we have a hard time dealing with super weapons now, imagine if someone went into the future and got an even more world ending device than a nuke? It would cause chaos. Not might, but would. Because people are ultimately fucked up and selfish and introducing a way to get badass super weapons means that everyone would try. "But what if you don't let people know you have a time machine and just used it yourself?" I imagine some might say. Do you really think that something like a time machine wouldn't get noticed? Between funding and governments/companies reading emails someone would notice something, it wouldn't stay a secret long enough to matter. Interestingly enough, if you believe that the time stream is a set structure then going into the future changes nothing and is therefore useless unfortunately. Unless you just want to know stuff for yourself and in no way can let other people see it.
"So if someone finds a way to time travel, they shouldn't, right?"
Damn you're talkative today! But anyway, here is where I will slightly contradict myself. If you have somehow found a way to time travel accidentally, you should totally do it. Not in an intentionally destructive way, but with the intent of answering questions. Progress is above ethics, at least to some degree. How else will we find the answers to questions like: how does time work? Sure it is dangerous, but take as many precautions as you can. Don't do big things like killing a dictator, experiment with minor things first, like guessing whether a coin flip will be heads or tails. See if it is actually totally random or if it would be the same every time. See if you can just make a window from which to observe the events of the past without messing with it. Imagine seeing if Christ was actually a magical god-baby sent to perform miracles via a deity that loves us, or what if he was just a variation on a mythological theme with really good PR? What if you could see the beginning of everything? Think of the questions you could answer!
Just remember there are consequences to your actions, even minor ones that you would need to be responsible for. So see if you think that the answers to questions are worth the risk. These answers would expand our understanding of the universe we live in and would be amazingly useful to the future. Unless you destroy the world. Then oops. But then hey, who is going to notice, amirite?
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