Gosh, as cynical as you guys sound, I'm hard pressed to come up with an alternative scenario. I'm not sure I wouldn't broaden the definition of "My God" though: are you implying that the Godless Commies in China and Burma wouldn't build really big guns too?
I always had trouble with this aspect of the "Star Trek Universe" which is basically exactly what B is describing: that somehow when there was no more scarcity that people would all just get along (well, at least *within* The Federation), when in fact all those scripts basically said that people (and every other species in the Universe) would do everything in their power to destroy their neighbor.
Actually even in Star Trek world, there were limits to anti-matter energy: still had scarcity in the form of those dilithium crystals and such, and that kept the mere mortals in much better shape than the Q-continuum of course...
More fundamentally, I think that creativity *comes* from scarcity, and if there really were no scarcity, that even if we found a way to be peaceable to one another, we would indeed end up as couch potatoes.
Boundless intemperance in nature is a tyranny,
Buffy
