One impact of time travel rarely considered by analysts is the redistribution of wealth. In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home when Montgomery Scott gives Doctor Nichols the formula for transparent aluminum, there is a very real chance that he has turned a moderately successful materials scientist into a fabulously wealthy inventor. This wealth puts the doctor in a different class of people, and perhaps more significantly it puts at least his children and possibly his grandchildren in a different class of people--it will be Princeton, not Rutgers, Harvard, not Widener. Invitations to the local Lions Club are replaced by those to thousand-dollar-per-plate White House fundraisers. The temptation to break up his marriage will come from a starlet, not a waitress.
What is also important to recognize is that even though in some sense new technologies create new wealth, that an improved standard of living in some sense means that there is more "money" in the world, in temporal terms it means that that new money "moved". The person who would have had it does not; Doctor Nichols has it instead. Doctor Nichols' heirs will probably meet and marry different people, and their children will be different, and the ripple created by this (discussed in connection with the Mandala Mimzy) will mean ultimately that millions of people who would have been born never will be.
That impact is mitigated in Star Trek by the history of the twenty-first century suggested by The Next Generation, in which millions die and civilization collapses; Doctor Nichols' wealth is short-lived, in generational terms. However, we have a similar threat in The Last Mimzy, related to lottery winnings.
It seems that at some point since he started dating Naomi, Larry White dreamed the winning numbers of a pending megamillions lottery. We might justly be skeptical. Larry did not take the dream seriously enough to buy a ticket; would he have written down the numbers? Did he recognize the numbers when they were drawn as being those from his dream? Memories of dreams are unstable--the best current theory is that they are comprised of random images which our brain attempts to form into logical sequence as it recalls them. They are morphic. It is entirely plausible that someone would "remember" something as having happened in a dream which was not at all what he dreamt.
However, granting Larry the benefit of the doubt, perhaps he did have such a dream. Now, as the film ends, he has a vision, and it is numbers, and Naomi is ecstatic. They are going to be incredibly rich, and her weak insistence that she wants it for all the good they can do with it doesn't fool even Larry.
It will change their lives. Lottery winners often say that they won't quit their jobs, but someone has joked that that's just because they can grin and think "I don't need this job" whenever it gets tough. They might not quit, but they won't be as serious about their work. They will become targets of thousands of charitable organizations seeking their donations, and made to feel like celebrities; it will change the lives of others with whom they come in contact, and of the many with whom now they do not come in contact.
It also changes the lives of whoever does not get those millions.
There are two ways this can be resolved.
First, it is entirely possible that Larry is mistaken; the numbers, if he saw any, are meaningless, or at least are not for any lottery he is likely to attempt to play. (If he saw the winning numbers for New Jersey's lottery two weeks from now, how likely is he in Washington State to buy the right ticket at the right time?) Sequences of numbers can mean just about anything--the winning horses at Belmont, the finals in March Madness, the dates of global disasters. So maybe Larry will never profit from whatever he saw.
The movie would like us to think otherwise, though. Larry and Naomi live happily ever after on the millions they win thanks to his vision. But that might be acceptable as well. Larry's dreams do not seem to be induced by the Mimzy; his dreams start earlier and his contact is indirect. So perhaps he does have precognitive visions, and he did see the winning lottery numbers--and would have done so that night whether or not there was a Mimzy. In that case, there is no change to history due to the money, because the money went where it always went.
It's a bit implausible, but at least it's not impossible. The next problem might not be so simple.
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