Scarcity. If you have abundance, you will also have abundance of energy, which will eventually turn earth and its ecosystem into a ball of molten magma (really plasma).

"Let me restate that important point. No matter what the technology, a sustained 2.3% energy growth rate would require us to produce as much energy as the entire sun within 1400 years. A word of warning: that power plant is going to run a little warm. Thermodynamics require that if we generated sun-comparable power on Earth, the surface of the Earth—being smaller than that of the sun—would have to be hotter than the surface of the sun!"

if abundance means intergalactic space travel, that sounds great and would help keep the earth from overheating, but that also means aliens have abundant power to reach and colonize / terraform us.

So, all in: scarcity.