Many out there may not know the story behind how Blue Planet Foundation came to be. Our founder Henk Rogers delivered the commencement address at University of Hawai‘i last Saturday, Dec. 17, and in his speech, he talks about why he started Blue Planet Foundation. It's a really inspiring speech. Go Henk! Read on...
Make History!
Aloha!
I am very honored to be here today. I am honored to be in the presence of greatness. The greatness is the graduating class of 2011. You guys are awesome. But you are not just awesome because you managed to maintain a grade point average four years. You are awesome because of what you are going to do. You are going to make history.
My name is Henk Rogers. I dropped out of UH to chase a girl to Japan. Don’t, laugh, she is my wife today and I’m not so sure what I’d be without her help and guidance.
My major was ICS (that’s Information and Computer Science). My minor was Dungeons and Dragons. Six years after leaving Hawaii, personal computers started to take off in Japan and I made a computer game. Black Onyx was the first Role Playing Game in Japan and became #1 in 1984.
I graduated from designing and programming games to publishing games from all over the world in Japan. One of the games I found at a trade show in Las Vegas was a little unknown game called Tetris. How many of you out there have played Tetris? Raise your hands.
I fell in love with the game and soon realized that this game was going to be a lot bigger than just Japan, so I got on a plane and flew to the Soviet Union armed only with a tourist visa.
Just to help you understand what that was like, it was kind of like flying into North Korea or Iran today on a tourist visa and trying to do business. It was a very exciting adventure that involved a long cast of characters including Robert Maxwell, the KGB, the Soviet Politburo and even Michael Gorbachev.
Well, to make a long story short, I managed to come back 10 days later with the Gameboy rights to Tetris. A few years later I helped, Tetris author, Alexey Pajitnov and his family come to the US. Today, we own and run “The Tetris Company”.
Tetris has sold over 70 million copies as boxed products, 130 million copies as downloads on mobile phones. We are fast approaching 20 million games played per day on Facebook.
Before I tell you how you are going to make history I’m going to talk to you about an experience I had earlier this year.
I had the pleasure of visiting a little country in Asia called Bhutan. Most people’s reaction to “I went to Bhutan” is “where on earth is that?” Well, it’s a country the size of Switzerland with less than half the population of Hawaii. It is bordered on the north by Tibet. Sandwiched between China and India, who have gobbled up its neighbors, it’s kind of a miracle that this country exists at all.
Bhutan is the land of happiness.
So, 75 of us from 25 countries went to Bhutan to attend a conference to “teach” the “backward” Bhutanese how to modernize in a sustainable way. You know, teach them how to be more like us. We spent two days learning about Bhutan and two days demonstrating sustainable technologies. At the end of the conference, all of us left Bhutan in a daze. We had all come to the realization that it was not about them becoming more like us. It was totally about us becoming more like them. Allow me to explain.
When the 4th king of Bhutan was asked about his GDP, his Gross Domestic Product, he answered, “Why do you western reporters always focus on money? What about Gross National Happiness?” His words have reverberated throughout Bhutan ever since.
When Prince Jigme Wanchuck graduated from university, just like you are about to do, he went home to Bhutan. His father asked him if he had learned something about how to run a country. Jigme said he did, since he had just studied political science for 5 years at Oxford (the English version of UH). So his father said. “Okay then. It’s all yours.” Jigme became the King of Bhutan at the age of 26.
So Jigme went about giving power to the people by creating a parliament and instituting his father’s concept of Gross National Happiness. Parliament works pretty much like our congress would if congress was not mostly dysfunctional. The difference is that, due to the rules of Gross National Happiness, they can’t do anything that:
1] adversely affects the culture
2] adversely affects the environment
3] does not make fiduciary sense
4] is not good governance
I can tell you this. They are the youngest democracy in the world and we, the most powerful democracy in the history of the world. And it feels like we can’t teach them a damn thing.
The bottom line is I flew half way around the world to a little country in the Himalayas to find something basic about life.
So if you forget everything else I say today remember this. It’s not about money. It’s about happiness. Money can’t buy happiness. You live happiness.
One way to look at happiness is that you are satisfied with your life on a day-to-day basis. But actually there is more to it than that. There is accomplishing your missions in life.
Everyone has missions. You have missions, although you may not yet know what they are. And if you don’t, I’ll give you one right now:
Your first mission is to find out what your missions in life are. If you don’t know what they are, you probably won’t accomplish them.
It took me 52 years to figure out my missions in life.
In those 52 years I managed to survive near drowning in big waves on the north shore. I managed to survive living in Japan for 18 years. I managed to survive starting a video game company in that country without being able to read or write (Japanese). I managed to survive four teenagers who have since miraculously turned into wonderful women and men. But the thing that I nearly did not survive was success.
I had just sold one of my companies, Blue Lava Wireless, a mobile phone game company, for more money than I had ever dreamed of. What I hadn’t noticed was that I had just had the most stressful year of my life. So a month after I sold my company, I had a major heart attack.
When someone asks you “would you like us to call an ambulance?” say “Yes”. This is seriously good advice. The cardiologist who saved me from certain death from a 100% blockage of the “widow maker” (that would be the largest artery in your heart) said that this was the best decision I ever made in my entire life.
In the ambulance, on the way to the hospital, I had vowed, just like I did that day on the North Shore, that I would not die today because I still had stuff to do. It is this stuff that I would like to talk to you about today.
As I was recovering, I had a chance to think about what stuff was. I realized that it was things that would really upset me if I did not do anything about them before I died. Something like a bucket list, only my buckets would turn out to be some pretty serious buckets.
I found my missions in life.
I have four missions in life. I could have stopped at three, but I didn’t. Just like having kids. I could have stopped at three but I didn’t.
I will count down to #1 because #4 is pretty big and I don’t want all of you leaving here thinking I’m completely crazy. Although I do admit that my fourth mission is kind of out there.
My fourth mission is to find out how the universe ends and do something about it.
I think this mission has something to do with the first computer game I developed which did in fact end in the hero saving the universe. You could be that hero.
At first I justified this mission by saying to myself “if the universe ends next week, I wont have to work on my other three mission and I can go beach”. But, I have actually been working on this one.
I gathered 25 of the top cosmologists and asked them. Their answer was that 96% of the stuff the Universe is made of is either dark matter (invisible stuff that make galaxies heavier than they appear to be) or dark energy (different invisible stuff that is either pushing pulling the universe apart). We can see only about 4% of what we think is out there.
But I have an interpretation. If we figure the true nature of the universe, we will solve some of the world’s major scientific puzzles. We will solve clean energy, warp drive, quantum communication, infinite bandwidth, that sort of stuff.
My third mission is to make a backup of life on earth.
Life, whether through spontaneous generation, pan spermia or divine intervention is probably the most interesting thing to happen on this planet. Ever. This could be the only planet with life in the entire universe. And all of our eggs are in this basket.
If my programmer lost a year’s work because his hard disk crashed and he had no backup, I would shoot him. You make backups. Do we have a backup of life on earth? No! We should be shot! We are life’s way of getting off this planet. We should take life to the Moon, to Mars, to wherever we can reach with whatever technology we can muster. It could be the reason for our existence.
If we managed to get life started on a barren planet and it survived, we would have done the greatest thing that ever happened to that planet. We would be the divine intervention. How cool would that be?
My second mission is to end war.
War is an incredible waste of human effort, not to mention human lives. I believe that some day young people will simply say “Hell no, we won’t go”. My mission is to bring that day forward as much as possible. It would be really nice if it happened in my lifetime.
After all why should we be allowed to send our children to fight our wars? Let the old guys fight it out if they have a beef. You know, like captain Kirk and the alien lizard captain deciding by having it out on a barren planet, rather than two spaceships full of “aliens” annihilating each other.
I bet if world leaders themselves were on the line, there would be a lot more talking and a lot less dying.
So now we get to the big one. Mission #1:
My first mission is to end the use of carbon based fuel.
I was in the hospital reading a newspaper. It was a small story buried among a bunch of “earth-watch” stories. It said that scientists had determined that due to ocean acidification all the coral in the world would die by the end of this century. This story said “mission #1” to me.
Acidification is caused by oceanic carbon dioxide absorption. That would be carbon dioxide made by combustion of what once was organic matter. Humans (that would include us) send 200 years of sequestered carbon (forests turned into coal and sea-life turned into oil) into the atmosphere (that would be the stuff we breathe) every single year. There is something really wrong with this.
The problem is bigger than the disappearing coral. The problem is climate change, violent hurricanes, water shortages, food shortages, sea-level rising, disappearing island nations, disappearing glaciers. You could say, but what does that have to do it me? Okay, I’ll tell you.
Let’s start with Hawaii. 96% of the energy we use in Hawaii comes from burning fossil fuel. We only have on average 22 days of fuel at any given time. Imagine if the tankers stopped coming for some reason. No jet planes. No cars. No ships. No electricity. No food. No television. No cell phones.
We have the highest energy prices and the most availability of alternative energy in the country. We now spend over $5 billion dollars on oil every single year. It’s the reason we can’t affordably grow food here. It’s the reason our jobs pay less than those on the mainland. It’s the reason we have so many homeless people.
What it has to do with you is the world will change drastically unless we do something now. I am working on it, but it is going to take everyone to wake up, smell the coffee and stop burning fuel to get energy. You are a lot smarter than that.
So I have started a foundation to work on this mission. It’s called the Blue Planet Foundation. We have been around for 5 years and these are some of the things we have accomplished:
The First Carbon Tax bill in the nation providing funding to alternative energy programs
On-Bill Financing
Feed-in Tariff
Home Energy Makeover TV shows
The sea-level awareness Blue Line Project
We organized thousands of school children to exchange almost 300,000 incandescent light bulbs for CFLs or LEDs
If I can convince you that this is possibly the most important problem facing your generation, please join the Foundation and make a difference.
So, these are my missions in life.
I envy you and your generation. Not because you have big problems facing you and that gives you a reason to live. I envy you because you will be the generation that solves some of the most pressing issues facing mankind.
So here’s how you are going to change history:
Some of you will unlock the secrets of the universe enabling the greatest scientific breakthroughs of all time.
Some of you will go to Mars to explore and colonize, like the ancient Polynesians who canoed across vast stretches of open ocean to explore and colonize Hawai’i.
Some of you will export our way of life here in Hawaii called the “spirit of Aloha” that enables people from all ethnic, religious and national backgrounds to live together in peace and harmony. “Aloha” could well be Hawaii’s biggest contribution to world peace.
Some of you will become the solution to our energy problem and in so doing, you will not only become the reason for the next economic miracle but you will have saved our environment in the most significant way imaginable.
Now go out there and..
Make History!
Aloha!
