What happened after the end of The Stars My Destination?

Warning: This question contains major spoilers for The Stars My Destination.

Alfred Bester, the author who most inspired everyone from Phillip K. Dick to William Gibson, wrote a novel called The Stars My Destination about a man who discovers he has the power to teleport anywhere he wants at will.

This character starts as an amoral, selfish, sociopathic rogue and, as he discovers that he is all-powerful and cannot be stopped by anyone or anything, begins to learn internalized morality and the weight of personal responsibility. Over the course of the story, he discovers that the government has been hiding a substance capable of exploding with a thought. In fact, not only can it explode by simply wishing it to explode, but you can make it explode any size. A single gram could blow up a planet if you wanted it to. Being the greatest and most dangerous secret on Earth, he steals the only sample.

Throughout the novel, the government chases him trying to get this explosive sample back. In the end, the man in charge of catching him tells him that he must admit defeat, that his teleportation power makes him effectively omnipotent, and appeals to his moral sense to return the explosive, that only the government can be trusted with something so existentially and inconceivably dangerous.

The novel is of course a metaphor for considering who should have control of destructive power such as atom bombs, nerve gas, and bioweapons capable of destroying the world. At the very end of the novel, the protagonist decides that no one can be allowed to have exclusive control of something so dangerous, and he uses his power to divide the explosive sample up and give a piece of it to every single human being on Earth.

My question to you is, what do you think happened five minutes after the end of the story? Every person on Earth is given the power to destroy the entire Earth with a thought, if they so chose, but are also aware that every other person has exactly the same power. Do you think given the sudden realization that having power over anyone is now ended forever that humanity would collectively learn individual responsibility and create a new world of mutual aid, wary respect, and cooperation… or do you think the entire solar system went up in the biggest explosion the Universe has seen since the Big Bang?

(Thinking about the possibility that the novel coronavirus might really be a bioweapon which escaped a military lab brought this story back to mind, and I’m curious whether the experience of this pandemic has changed the way people think about who should have the right to wield world-ending power.)