Tetsunori Koizumi, Director

On April 29, 2015, Blue Origin, the spacecraft company founded by Jeff Bezos, the founder and the CEO of Amazon, became the first company to launch a rocket into space, fly it back to Earth, and re-launch it. On February 6, 2018, SpaceX, the aerospace company founded by Elon Musk, launched the Falcon Heavy rocket into deep space, carrying the billionaire’s electric car with a mannequin named “Starman.”

Ever since 1957, when the Soviet Union launched the first satellite into orbit, space exploration has been mostly carried out by government agencies such as NASA, Roscosmos, and the European Space Agency. While companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin have been involved in the NASA’s space program in the US as private contractors, the emergence of companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX signal the arrival of a new age of space exploration in which the initiative shifts from government agencies to private enterprises. Along with this shift will be the shift of emphasis from the science-motivated exploration of space to the profit-motivated search for celestial objects in space. In addition to Blue Origin and SpaceX, other companies such as iSpace, Moon Express, and Nanoracks are also involved in space exploration as capitalistic ventures. The idea of space exploration as capitalistic ventures was eloquently expressed by Musk, when he told at the press conference held after the successful launch of Falcon Heavy rocket: “We want a new space race. Races are exciting.”¹

Bezos’ vision is to create a real space age and a real space economy, aiming for profitability by 2020 and market dominance by 2040. Bezos is confident that once space is safe and cheap, entrepreneurs will rush to create new businesses, for the abundance of natural resources in asteroids and comets can be used to produce products in space and send the finished products back to Earth. Moon Express, an American company, is planning to send a lunar mission in 2019 to set up a “robotic village” and bring back Moon rocks to Earth in 2020 for sale. And Planetary Resources, an American company, and Deep Space Industries, an American-Luxembourg joint company, are planning to mine asteroids. As for SpaceX, it plans to send a spacecraft to Mars by 2022, with an ultimate goal of colonizing it.²

With private enterprises entering space exploration, the stage of global capitalism has expanded to include the whole universe. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the age of cosmic capitalism has arrived, in which everything that is out there in space becomes an object of profit for capitalistic ventures, including a star. In a way, the coming age of cosmic capitalism was anticipated as far back as 1943, when the businessman in Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s Little Prince uttered these words: “When you find a diamond that belongs to nobody, it is yours. When you discover an island that belongs to nobody, it is yours. When you get an idea before anyone else, you take out a patent on it: it is yours. So with me: I own the stars, because nobody else before me ever thought of owning them.”³

The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 forbids claiming sovereignty over celestial bodies, but does not prohibit owning and selling stuff extracted from them. This means that, while the Treaty says that space’s use should be “for the benefit of all peoples,” there is no guarantee that those billionaire entrepreneurs will share profits they earn from their capitalistic ventures in space. Considering that the concentration of wealth in the hands of a small number of rich capitalists has already become a big problem under global capitalism, opening up space for capitalistic ventures under cosmic capitalism may further exasperate the wealth divide between rich and poor—something we need to ponder before we are caught up in the excitement of the arrival of a new age of space exploration.

1. As quoted in: Alan Yuhas, “The New Space Race: How Billionaires Launched the Next Era of Exploration,” The Guardian, February 9, 2018.
2. For these and other companies involved in space exploration, see: Benjamin Sutherland, “Reaching for the Stars,” The Economist, The World in 2018.
3. Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince, Chapter 13.

Tetsunori Koizumi, Director

The United Nations General Assembly adopted March 20 as the International Day of Happiness in 2012. March 20 was chosen to coincide with the spring equinox, which signifies a passage of seasons noted and celebrated by people all around the world. The International Day of Happiness has been celebrated since 2013 not just by member nations of the United Nations but also by many NGOs and other civic and community groups.

Long before the United Nations adopted the International Day of Happiness, an important initiative was taken by Bhutan, a small country sandwiched between China and India, back in the 1970s to embark on a new social initiative away from the materialistic conception of social progress and welfare measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP), replacing it with a new concept called Gross National Happiness (GNH). Coined by Jigme Singye Wangchuck in 1974, the Fourth Dragon King of Bhutan from 1972 till 2006, the promotion of Gross National Happiness has since been incorporated into the Constitution of Bhutan, a parliamentary democracy since 2008. As a concept, Gross National Happiness consists of information on nine domains: good governance, psychological well-being, balanced time-use, community vitality, health, education, cultural diversity, living standards, and ecological diversity.

Considering that it recognizes the pursuit of happiness as a fundamental human goal, it was natural that the United Nations would pick up the idea of conceiving social progress and welfare broadly over and beyond material progress as measured by GDP. The decision to adopt the International Day of Happiness, followed by the publication of annual “World Happiness Report,” was a clear recognition on the part of the United Nations that all nations should be concerned with happiness and well-being of all peoples while raising living standards and promoting sustainable development.

The World Happiness Report by the United Nations ranks nations according to an index based on information on six key factors: income, freedom, trust, life expectancy, social support, and generosity. Denmark, Finland, Norway and Switzerland have consistently done well since the first report, with Finland coming at the top in the 2018 report. While the idea of promoting happiness and well-being is commendable, what seems to be forgotten is that the very idea of ranking nations according to some index is an outstanding example of the linear mode of thinking, which reflects the notion of rationality as developed and promoted in the evolution of Western civilization. In fact, the idea that there is progress in human history in the form of increasing material standards of living was a product of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.

Nations are complex systems as systems go. Hence, the idea of representing the state of a nation just by a single index, whatever it may be and however it may be measured, must be said to be too simplistic to capture the reality of nations as complex systems. Bhutan may indeed be a land of happiness, but how do we reconcile that characterization with the fact that about 12 percent of its population fall below the poverty line, finding it difficult to send their children to schools and receive proper health care, and with the recent problem of youth unemployment and substance abuse? What is needed is a composite picture of how nations are doing as systems, which cannot be reduced to a single index.

Aside from the problem of measurement, there is further problem with the idea of representing happiness of nations by some kind of index. What is most serious is its neglect of the spiritual aspect of happiness taught, for example, in Buddhism. Is not happiness something that we nourish through our daily practice, cultivating understanding and love not just for ourselves but also for those around us? If there is one thing that is clear, it is that happiness is not something that we celebrate once a year on the International Day of Happiness.