As is already suspected, time travel is very well possible. There are some technical challenges to overcome, and we would have to live with some fundamental functional limitations, but those are no reasons not to do it. The only problem is that it is very, very expensive. And a bit dangerous as well.
The first working time machine will be invented somewhere around 2300. According to common twentyfirst century science, time travel is either not possible or would require all or most of the mass in the universe to get you somewhere, depending who you ask. It would at least be very inefficient. Well, that's not true. Science is just not looking in the right direction at this moment.
The other myth is that time machines can only be used to travel time that lies in the future of the machine's invention. The common 'proof' for this being: If it were possible, why didn't we meet tourists from the future? Also not true. Twentythird century time machines (and in fact, all time machines) could travel back and forth to anywhen they'd be programmed to travel, even to a point in time before the big bang (which by the way actually never happened).
Two hundred years from now, someone will look in the right direction, and build a very nice time machine. But even though it will not require all the mass and/or energy of ou universe to operate, it will follow the law of temporal inertia: Every change applied to spacetime will require an amount of energy proportional to the amount of change in the information topology of the universe. If someone would go back in time and kill a certain toddler named Adolf, there would be a major shift in information. Half the population of the world would live entirely diffent lives than they would have otherwise, provided that they even lived at all. This would cost so much energy, that the enterprise wouldn't be possible even with twentythird century technology and ditto energy budgets. You know what a gallon of petrol costs these days and no new fossil fuel deposits will be found in the next two centuries, trust me.
But energy can also be won back with information. Information tends to degrade over time. Normally this is a slow and predictable process you may experience yourself when you try to play an old video tape. Years ago, the image and sound were crisp and clear, but now it is ridden with random bands of static and hiss. This is called entropy. Entropy is the way of the universe to revert itself to a more chaotic state in order to conserve itself. It is unavoidable and as unreversable as baking an egg. The strange thing is that creating order costs as much energy as creating chaos, so why the universe has this 'preference' for chaos, we don't know. Since order requires awareness and purpose to be appreciated, and the universe (for all we know) lacks both, we can profit from this.
If we can prevent or at least postpone the entropic process, we can borrow energy from the universe that can be converted to energy later on and then used in any form we'd fancy. But how do we intercept entropy in its finest hour? The human brain is one of the densest (and meaningful) places for information to be found, and luckily for us, it has a very distinct moment of total entropy. One moment one breathes, thinks and talks, the next moment one is completely and unreversibly dead. Entropy takes place in mere seconds, destroying petabytes of information that has taken decades to form.
Also, the moment of death of most people is recorded minutely, so it would require a time traveler only a small envelope of time to witness a very valuable moment and profit from it. Two hundred years from now, reading the contents of a brain is as easy as plugging a flashdrive into your computer is today.
To be continued.
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