When time travel becomes available, will you use it?

There are mathematical proofs for the feasibility of time travel, and we even know how to accomplish it: bend light in a circle. Time and space are different ways of expressing the same phenomenon, so bending space bends time, and vice versa. Generate a strong enough magnetic field to trap light and you’ve got a time machine. (Of course, this time machine will only allow you to travel along the length of its light cone, meaning you can’t travel to any point before the machine was switched on.)

Time travel doesn’t violate any known laws… so long as you never re-enter the same frame of time. That is, when you “travel in time,” what you’re really doing is generating an entirely new Universe which is exactly like the previous one, except that you’re occupying a different quantum slice of space/time. In the Universe you used to inhabit, you simply disappear forever.

That means every time you use a time travel machine, you will leave everyone and everything behind forever. You can never return to that Universe. Everyone you know – your friends, your family, your loved ones – will be gone forever. There will be new versions of all those people, but they will not be the same ones you left behind. They will seem exactly the same, but you’ll always know that the ones you used to know are still in some other Universe waiting for you to return.

Would you do it? Would you leave your whole Universe behind to discover what the future has to offer?