Time is Not the Final Frontier

What's with the obsession with time travel?* I mean obviously, I can see the appeal, but I just don't understand how it could possibly be the least bit practical. It seems like as soon as it was even close to being invented, the government would regulate the hell out of it, basically removing even the smallest bit of awesome potential it could have had. Of course, it might not have been awesome in the first place, once you consider how freaking difficult it would be to actually do anything.

First of all, going to the past would just be impossible. If it weren't, we would have seen time travelers by now.** And of course, we couldn't use it to study history, because the things that we DON'T know about history would make us stick out. A lot. Plus, if the machine goes with you, how exactly are you going to hide it? I'm pretty sure people would notice it. I imagine a time machine would have to be pretty big. Maybe that's what we could make out of all those phone booths nobody uses anymore.

Going to the future just seems sort of redundant. I mean, we're going to find out what's going to happen EVENTUALLY. Granted, it could allow us to prepare better, but if there's ever some sort of cataclysmic event, the owners of the time machine will probably all die once they arrive in the future. And I'm sure all these religious groups will get all worked up because "only God has the right to know our fate" or something like that. Basically, no one's going to fund it, and if they do, they probably won't get to tell us what they find out.

*This entire post will be written while conveniently ignoring the fact that time travel is completely impossible as far as I know. Which is not a whole lot actually.
**Or maybe not. I'm not entirely sure why you would want to come back to this time period. Maybe the entire world has been dominated by the McDonald's corporation and they want to come back to get food that doesn't taste like rat poison. This is of course ignoring the possibility that we HAVE seen them, but we just dismiss them as crazy people screaming "I'M FROM DA FOOCHUR!!" Or we've developed cloaking technology or something.