The Reality Bubble Read online

  ADVANCE PRAISE FOR

  THE REALITY BUBBLE

  “In a time of mounting global crisis, the kind of radical curiosity that fills this book—a commitment to probing the unseen, unknowable, and unthinkable—has become essential to our survival. In Ziya Tong’s hands, we learn that it can be joyous, too, with thrilling facts, questions, and juxtapositions on every page. A kaleidoscopic guide to everything we’re missing.”

  —Naomi Klein, bestselling author of No Is Not Enough, The Shock Doctrine, and No Logo

  “This book will tear through your preconceptions like a meteor through space. Ziya Tong is a wonderfully erudite companion on a tour of reality, from the very smallest to the size of the universe and everything in between. It’s an incredibly illuminating and challenging but ultimately empowering book, and reading it delivers a shock almost on the level as when Neo took the red pill in The Matrix. Prepare to have your bubble well and truly burst.”

  —Rowan Hooper, New Scientist

  “Humans have a warped perception of reality. Ziya Tong pierces through this collective fog, using a scientific lens to show us our place in the world as it really is. With a journalist’s eye for drama, she uses examples from both the history of science and the latest research to expose uncomfortable truths about the shortsighted ways we produce food and energy and dispose of waste, which are jeopardizing life on Earth. Her arguments compel us to look sharp—we remain in this reality bubble at our own peril.”

  —Kate Wong, Scientific American

  “Not only is this book a delightful tour of scientific wonders, but it’s also a profound meditation on why humans have such a hard time getting out of our bubbles and changing our ways. With grace and humor, Ziya Tong reveals our blind spots—both literal and philosophical—and guides us toward a better future that we can face with both eyes open.”

  —Annalee Newitz, founder of io9 and author of Scatter, Adapt, and Remember

  “A book this audacious, inventive, and soulful shouldn’t also be so much fun to read. Ziya Tong scours the universe of human knowledge to reframe how we see the world and our place in it.”

  —Elan Mastai, author of All Our Wrong Todays

  “The Reality Bubble has opened eyes I didn’t even know I had. It is so hard to explain how we humans perceive the world, knowing that we can’t tell if we all perceive it the same way. This is where Ziya is beyond brilliant: She breaks down how our individual constructions of reality are far more artificial than we realize, which will leave me trying to answer a whole lot of existential questions for some time to come.”

  —Derek Mead, executive editor, global, VICE

  “The world we inhabit is not what it appears to our senses to be. In The Reality Bubble, Ziya Tong takes us on a fascinating, whirlwind tour through many unfamiliar aspects of the reality we thought we knew. It is both sobering and mind-blowing to realize how deeply immersed we are in previously hidden realms which science has revealed to us but which most of us ignore at our peril. Tong is an able guide, leading us through the maze of illusions, and helping us to shed our veils of delusion. She illuminates the unseen, and often dangerous, bubbles within which we live out our lives.”

  —David Grinspoon, Senior Scientist at Planetary Science Institute and prize-winning author of Earth in Human Hands

  “Filled with entertaining, often surprising, information, The Reality Bubble reveals how science enables us to ‘see’ beyond the constraints of our physical and psychic barriers and recognize the consequences. Ziya Tong’s book should be required reading for all who care about what we are doing to the planet.”

  —David Suzuki, broadcaster, geneticist, and author of The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering our Place in Nature

  “Ziya Tong takes readers on an important and entertaining scientific journey, as she breaks open all the hidden ways we interact with the natural world every day. Read this book to start seeing—with new eyes—how we can transform our relationship with the extraordinary planet we live on.”

  —Dr. Jane Goodall, primatologist and conservationist

  “Ziya has been reading and thinking about our environments, large and small, for years, and reminds us again and again of the idea of shifting baselines. We accommodate too much of what we experience, moving from surprise to acceptance, recalibrating all the way. This book urges us to be vigilant against that.”

  —Jay Ingram, television and radio host, and author of The Science of Why

  “Amid the screaming alarms of the Anthropocene—species collapse, habitat loss, social pathologies—Ziya Tong takes a sledgehammer to the bad ideas that brought us to the brink of apocalypse: unbridled capitalism, technological escapism, species-centrism. Equal parts disaster novel and postmodern cabinet of wonders (and terrors), The Reality Bubble makes a passionate, rationalist case for saving the planet before we back off history’s cliff, selfie sticks in hand.”

  —Mark Dery, author of I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-By Essays on American Dread, American Dreams

  “Human beings are built to detect short-range, near-term threats, and yet our social fabric (and maybe even our species itself) depends on learning to detect the stuff that never directly touches us. In The Reality Bubble, Ziya Tong delivers an energetic crash course in this mismatch between our evolutionary gifts and our circumstances. The blind spots she describes are the ones that keep us from internalizing the threat of climate change, the dangers of political manipulation via social networks—even the difficulty of saving for retirement. The physiological and cognitive basis of our reality bubble is something we have to learn about ourselves to get out in front of humanity’s biggest problems, and Tong explains the subject, without judgement or derision, in a way that will benefit us all.”

  —Jacob Ward, NBC News Technology Correspondent, host of the PBS series “Hacking Your Mind,” and former editor-in-chief of Popular Science

  ALLEN LANE

  an imprint of Penguin Canada,

  a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited

  Canada • USA • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China

  First published 2019

  Copyright © 2019 by Ziya Tong

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Tong, Ziya, author

  The reality bubble / Ziya Tong.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 9780735235564 (hardcover).—ISBN 9780735235571 (electronic)

  1. Science—Popular works. 2. Science—Miscellanea. I. Title.

  Q162.T66 2019    500    C2018-904283-4

                   C2018-904284-2

  Cover and interior design: Lisa Jager

  Cover images: (front) Mike Hill / Getty Images; (back) Xinhui Xu / Unsplash

  v5.3.2

  a

  For my family.

  Up to the Twentieth Century, reality was everything humans could touch, smell, see, and hear. Since the initial publication of the chart of the electromagnetic spectrum, humans have learned that what they can touch, smell, see, and hear is less than one-millionth of reality. Ninety-nine percent of all that is going to affect our tomorrows is being developed by humans using instruments and working in ranges of reality that are nonhumanly sensible.

  •

  —
R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  PART ONE: BIOLOGICAL BLIND SPOTS

  1 The Open Jar

  2 Mind Bomb

  3 I to Eye

  PART TWO: SOCIETAL BLIND SPOTS

  4 Recipe for Disaster

  5 Black Gold

  6 Trash & Treasure

  PART THREE: CIVILIZATIONAL BLIND SPOTS

  7 Time Lords

  8 Space Invaders

  9 Human Robots

  10 The Empire Wears No Clothes

  11 Revolution

  Acknowledgements

  INTRODUCTION

  IN LIFE, WE ALL HAVE a moment when we wake up to a bigger picture. For Ann Hodges, that moment arrived on November 30, 1954, at precisely 1:46 P.M., while she was lying on the couch. It wasn’t so much an epiphany as a painful reality that struck her that day, when a lime-green “cosmic missile” streaked across the clear afternoon sky, crashed through her roof, bounced off a console radio, and flew smack into the side of her body.

  As the only known person to be hit by a meteorite, Ann became an instant sensation. By nightfall, hundreds of people, including the national news media, descended upon her backyard, snapping photos of the extraterrestrial object, checking out the damage to her house, and looking in awe and horror at the jet-black, football-sized bruise the impact left on her hip.

  Because she was napping, Ann had slept through the fireball’s spectacular descent. Witnesses saw it blaze across three states; TVs began scrambling from the alien interference; and the sonic boom jolted a boy right off his bike more than one hundred kilometres away, in Montgomery, Alabama. As for the locals, when the shooting star finally hit ground zero in the town of Sylacauga, most of them thought they’d heard a plane crash or an exploding bomb.

  After a few weeks, though, as with all freak accidents, the buzz died down. The reporters packed up and went home and the neighbours returned to their daily lives. And while the meteorite certainly made an impression on everyone that day, only one person’s cosmic perspective was forever changed. For Ann Hodges, the universe, with its meteors and comet showers and supernovas, was no longer a separate place somewhere “out there.” Oh, no. The cosmos could come right into your house, if it wanted to, and slap you wide awake.

  * * *

  —

  FAR FROM BEING IDYLLIC and tranquil, the heavens are hell. You’ve got your raging flames, your choking plumes of poisonous gas; darkness, chaos, and violent destruction are pretty much everywhere. In fact, if you look up into the sky tonight in the direction of Sagittarius, just above the archer’s arrow, there’s a supermassive black hole in our galaxy that is, at this very moment, obliterating everything within its horizon.

  That’s the universe we live in. But it’s not the way it feels. That you and I are relatively calm right now, that we aren’t in a raw panic at the total and utter mayhem that dangles right above our heads, is because we live in a bubble, a physical one called the atmosphere. From space, this dome is clearly visible. It’s a thin, bluish-white film that acts like a planetary force field: it blocks out lethal radiation, maintains temperatures within a tiny range (compared to the extremes of space), and incinerates most of the meteors that would otherwise pulverize the surface of Earth.

  As human beings, we all live inside another kind of bubble as well: a psychological one that shapes our ideas about the everyday world. This is our “reality bubble.” Just as rocks hurtling at supersonic speed find it hard to penetrate Earth’s atmosphere, unwelcome facts and unfamiliar ideas almost never make it through the membrane of the reality bubble. It shields us from thinking about forces “out there” that are seemingly beyond our control and lets us get on with the business of our lives.

  But problems arise with inflated certainty, and we see it over and over again. Whether it’s real estate bubbles, or stock market bubbles, or political bubbles, being in a bubble means, by definition, that we’ve got a warped perception of reality. And in the end, all bubbles share the same fate: inevitably, they burst.

  So we might do well to remember that even our most stable conceptions of the world can be overturned. For over two centuries, the universe was understood to be governed by Newtonian physics, and then Einstein came along. But it doesn’t always take a genius to expand our view of the world. Sometimes it just happens. For Ann Hodges, it happened when a meteorite torpedoed through her ceiling one afternoon. And for you, it may just be the book that you’re holding in your hands right now.

  * * *

  —

  HUMANS HAVE A TENDENCY to think we have an accurate picture of the world, but often we’re wrong. That’s because every person is born with a blind spot. In fact, we have two: one in each eye. In the same way that you would be unable to see all of the movie screen if you were given a crummy seat behind the projector at a theatre, situated at the back of your eyeballs there’s an area where light receptors do not grow, because it’s the exact spot where the optic nerve jacks into your brain. And yet, despite the fact that the area it eclipses is relatively large (nine full moons in the sky could fit in this broken field of view), most of us never even notice it.

  The best way to see what you cannot see is with your own eyes. So let’s take a look. Cover your left eye and use your right eye to look at the dot above. Now, with your eye still trained on the dot—staying aware of the cross but not focused on it—begin to move your head slowly towards and away from the book. You should notice that at a certain point the cross suddenly vanishes; it disappears from sight. Remarkably, this blank spot doesn’t register as some sort of void. Instead, our brain compensates for the emptiness, and with our own perceptual version of Photoshop it even fills in the right background colour. Our blind spots are perfectly camouflaged. We are blind to our blindness.

  Now, you might think that a blind spot this obvious would have been detected long ago, but it wasn’t until a French physicist named Edme Mariotte was dissecting an eye and came across the bundle of nerves connected to the retina, that he wondered if it might be blocking our sight. Doing some vision tests with his own eyesight, he discovered what was soon to become a mini-sensation in the 1600s. It delighted the nobles of the royal court, who revelled in the magic trick of making each other disappear without blinking an eye. Legend has it that across the Channel, King Charles II would play this visual trick with his prisoners, visually decapitating them with his mind’s eye before later executing them in real life.

  Of course, blind spots are not only in our eyes; they are also in our surroundings. The French for “blind spot” (angle mort or death angle) says it all: every year in the United States alone, 840,000 car accidents happen because we can’t see something very large driving at us until it crashes into our field of view.

  * * *

  —

  THE PHILOSOPHER LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN once said that “the aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.” Put another way, we often can’t see what’s right in front of our noses. We’ve all experienced it: looking everywhere for your keys when they are staring right at you from the kitchen counter.

  Individually, we can be blind to the obvious, but collectively, as a society, we can be blind as well. Here’s a curious fact to consider: in the twenty-first century, there are cameras everywhere, except where our food comes from, where our energy comes from, and where our waste goes. How is it, then, that the most powerful species on the planet is blind to how it survives?

  You might say that modern humans interface with nature as though we live in a bubble. It’s the reason why, in the United Kingdom, one in three young adults don’t know that eggs come from chickens, a third of children believe that cheese comes from plants, and a whopping 40 percent of youth have no idea that milk comes from cows. For these kids, food comes from where you’d think i
t comes from: “Duh,” the supermarket.

  Now, it’s not the case that young people aren’t smart; it’s just that their focus has shifted. The average child in the United States spends forty-five hours a week looking at electronic media and only half an hour of unregulated time outdoors. That being the case, we shouldn’t be surprised that the cultural world fogs over the natural one. Immersed in this environment, the average American kid is able to recognize one thousand corporate logos but can’t name ten plants or animals native to the area in which they live.

  Adults don’t fare much better. From inside the bubble, the origin of our greatest source of energy—the fuel that powers our global economy—is also a big unknown. If you take a moment to ask around, you’ll soon discover that the average person has no idea what oil is. The liquid we pump into our gas tanks to get to work doesn’t come from the pulp of dinosaurs, but every tank of gas is powered by a thousand tons of ancient life. So which dead species fuel our daily commute? And what caused those giant graveyards that pressure-cooked into the rich black oil fields we drill for energy?

  Finally, we are exceptionally blind to what we waste. From excrement to trash to toxic waste, we live with the illusion that refuse can be made to disappear or, with the push of a button, be magically flushed away. That our waste goes somewhere, that our own pollution finds its way right back into the food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe, is one of the reasons the human race is in such deep shit today.

  The kicker is our ignorance as a species would be a lot easier to write off if we weren’t also so intelligent. After all, we are the smartest animals on Earth. We are the primates with superpowers. We can fly at the speed of sound and communicate across the planet at the speed of light. Our species has figured out how to hack DNA and change the very codes that govern life.