Your friend seems to be trying to increase the sum of human happiness.
However, I do not doubt that it creates more human happiness.
It would promote human happiness in other ways as well.
And now the main priority - is to show people, who they should become, in order to find regular human happiness.
His response to one of the set questions "Has science increased human happiness?"
Which leaves us looking for the least worst ways to achieve human happiness.
This will not add to the sum total of human happiness.
In short, human happiness was pursued by means of culture and progress.
It then follows that real human happiness is independent of the physical world.
Augustine wrote a whole book (the happy life) about human happiness.