The Reality Bubble Read online

  But the problem is that life is disappearing.

  Scientists tell us we are currently in the midst of the sixth great extinction. On land, from armadillos to zebras, animal populations are plummeting. In the sea, fish stocks are crashing and coral reefs are bleaching. Glaciers are melting. Droughts are increasing. Wildfires are raging. The population is exploding and the climate is changing. The creep of catastrophe nears day by day, and yet when we reach out our arms…it is only to take another selfie.

  That somewhere in the back of our minds we know civilization is teetering on the brink explains our cultural obsession with the zombie apocalypse. These dark fantasies don’t come from nowhere. We all know that things are going very wrong, but living in a bubble means that, for now, we get to ignore it. Instead, we playfully channel our collective unease, mocking our own fear of a seemingly imminent societal crash. From TV shows to survival guides, we “joke” about building bunkers and stockpiling weapons and food supplies. In cities around the world, tens of thousands gather in “zombie walks” dressed in ghoulish makeup and rags, limping along in a low-rumble chant for one, singular desire.

  And what is it that the zombies want? The zombies want braaaains.

  It’s worth asking whether we could fend for ourselves if there were no societal means for survival. Because when you think about it, our system of society works precisely because we conform to it, like brainless zombies. The human population is almost eight billion strong, marching to a capitalist drumbeat of eat, work, shop, and sleep. Now, it might be one thing if we loved it, but we don’t. I mean, seriously, have you ever met anyone in your life who loves the rat race?

  So, given that humanity faces dire consequences and that most of us don’t even like what we do, the question is: Why do we do it?

  The big myth, I will argue, is that we are brought up believing there is no other way. We are simply told that this is how the system works. But what if there is another way? What if this “real world” we’re so invested in isn’t that real at all? What if we could scrub away the fog of humanity’s biggest blind spots so we can see more clearly and begin to uncover what is beyond our reality bubble?

  Proust famously said, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” And so our journey must begin right where we are: by seeing the ordinary, everyday world we live in, in an extraordinary new way.

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  IN JOHN CARPENTER’S 1988 cult classic sci-fi movie They Live, a drifter named John Nada gets hold of a pair of special sunglasses that reveal “truths” that ordinary citizens can’t see. Putting them on and looking at magazine ads, billboards, or the TV, he sees their real messages: to obey, consume, conform, and stay asleep.

  As a modern parable, the film struck a chord. Its influence can be seen in films, video games, and street art, like Shepard Fairey’s Obey series, and in Hal Hefner’s political posters and web memes. The film’s secret conceit is this: if only a pair of glasses like this existed, people might begin to question why reality is not what it seems.

  Luckily, something like that does exist.

  In this book, we will venture into the unseen world around us, but instead of fictional sunglasses we will be using scientific lenses to bring hidden views to light. That’s because scientific instruments are, in a very real way, our new eyes, giving us superhuman abilities to see and hear well beyond what our senses perceive.

  On true crime shows, we often catch a glimpse of what modern science can reveal. A nice, tidy living room might appear perfectly ordinary to the naked eye, but once investigators have sprayed luminol—a chemical that reacts with iron in hemoglobin—and flicked off the lights, the chemical’s neon-blue glow illuminates blood splatters on the wall, revealing a grisly crime scene.

  We have a tendency to think that seeing is believing, but there is so much that we don’t see unaided. The same is true for the world around us. Our vision is feeble compared with the most advanced scientific tools. Telescopes allow us to see galaxies over thirteen billion light years away, and using electron microscopes, we can zoom right down to the atomic level to see and touch the very building blocks of our universe.

  In the pages ahead then, reality will at times seem bizarre and disorienting. Like falling down a rabbit hole into Wonderland. We will shrink in size, grow into giants, and even find ourselves understanding the languages of other animals. Applying this scientific lens to the world around us radically alters our old ideas about the world, allowing us to question what surrounds us, what sustains us, and, perhaps most importantly, what controls us.

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  AS A SCIENCE BROADCASTER and journalist, I have spent more than a decade interviewing and learning from the world’s top scientists and thinkers. One of the great advantages of working with scientists from many different fascinating fields is that it has given me a broad spectrum of scientific knowledge to draw from, allowing me to share and communicate expertise from a wide range of disciplines. These different disciplines are like pieces in a puzzle. Individually, each gives us a clue as to what’s going on, but only by putting them together can we see the bigger picture.

  And now more than ever, we need to see clearly, because we are at a critical juncture in human history. Our species is locked on a deadly collision course, one that threatens to extinguish life on Earth precisely because our vision of reality is incompatible with scientific truth. Instead, what we call “common sense” thinking has blinded us for far too long.

  In this book, we will examine ten of humanity’s biggest blind spots. Section One begins with an introduction to the blind spots we are born with as individuals, and reveals how science and technology allow us to see beyond our biological limits. With this new form of sight, we will journey through the everyday world to uncover what our own eyes are unable to perceive.

  In Section Two, we will look at our collective blind spots and investigate how as a society we engage in willful blindness. We’ll focus on the most critical aspects of our basic biology—our food, energy, and waste—and see how science has radically transformed the support system our lives depend on, and engineered a world that to the average person is almost entirely opaque.

  Finally, in Section Three, we will examine intergenerational blind spots. These are ways of thinking about the world that seem natural or inevitable but are in fact inherited world views passed on from generation to generation. Here we will examine how we navigate the grand dimensions of time and space like the proverbial fish that knows not the water in which it swims.

  Carl Sagan once said that “our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.” This book is a humble effort to respond to that need. So let us begin.

  1

  THE OPEN JAR

  Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins.

  Which of the two has the grander view?

  —VICTOR HUGO

  IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE, Dondidier was gone, but his disappearance was not a part of the circus act. As the Hamilton Daily Times reported on August 16, 1913, detectives and sniffer dogs were quickly dispatched to track down the performer, who vanished two days before opening night. Fortunately, the show was not called off. By Friday evening, the acrobat was spotted by a crew member, hiding inside the main tent. And while the fiasco made the headlines, for the public, the real story was not his mysterious return, it was his worth. The circus star was valued at $500, which, in today’s money is more than $12,000; a preposterous amount by all accounts, since Dondidier was just a flea.

  A century before the bright lights of Hollywood, the greatest show on earth was tiny: it was the flea circus. The little top was an international sensation, and in cities like New York, Paris, and London, crowds came from afar to watch the parasites perform. There were the ballerina fleas, the sword-fighting fleas, the cannonball fleas, the strongman fleas, the tightrope walkers, the tango danc
ers, and the trapeze artists. It was here, dazzled by their miniature feats of daring, that audiences applauded the most reviled creature of them all: Pulex irritans, the bloodthirsty, plague-carrying, human flea, had catapulted into the spotlight and become a star.

  The popularity of the flea circus came, in part, from its well-guarded secret. The big question being: How do you train a flea? Plucked quite literally from the casting couch, the insects were skilled fugitives and could easily hop off the stage and escape. So, when pressed, the flea trainers, or “professors” as they were formally known, revealed a trick for taming the tiny beasts: to keep the animals under control at all times, they held them in an invisible prison.

  To do this, the fleas were dropped into a small glass jar and carefully sealed inside. As wingless pests that evolved to leap onto their hosts for a blood meal, fleas have spring-loaded legs that let them jump over one hundred times their own height and the endurance to keep bouncing over thirty thousand times. But inside the jar, their athletic prowess worked against them, because as the fleas shot skyward, they smacked their bodies hard, and repeatedly, up against the lid.

  But soon—to avoid the pain—the fleas learned; instead of jumping high, they jumped lower so they no longer ricocheted off the top. At this point, according to the professors, you could leave the lid off forever and the pests would never escape. For the fleas, freedom was only a bounce away, but the trap had been set in their minds.

  The story was good. Good enough to fend off the curious—but it also wasn’t true. And while flea training may yet hold a lesson for human society, it was completely lost on the fleas. That’s because behind the scenes, as the “professors” knew full well, the bloodsuckers could not be trained; that if you put a flea inside a jar and remove the lid, a flea, of course, will flee.

  But peering through magnifying glasses, eyewitnesses swore that they saw the fleas dancing and juggling at their master’s bidding. So the question remains: how did the insects perform the incredible stunts? It turns out, the cheerful spectacle had a dark side. For the fleas, it was torture.

  Dressed in pink tutus and glued to tiny parasols, the insects were not willing participants. The gold wire leashes that they wore were harnesses that were used to subject them to noxious conditions. “Soccer-playing” fleas, for instance, played with a tiny cotton ball soaked in citronella, which was repulsive enough to them that they kicked it away on contact. The “jugglers,” on the other hand, were held on their backs with glue and the motion of their legs rolled a lint ball above them. As for the musicians in the flea “orchestra,” they were tied down to seats on a music box, each with a miniature instrument stuck to its forelegs. Then, with a little tap on the head to each—or sometimes, more sadistically, with a flame lit beneath—they’d begin flailing their free legs about, giving the appearance of waving to the music.

  Now before we cue the tiny violin, we should be reminded that to the average person, one flea’s life is worthless. Even a hundred lives, or a hundred thousand. We wouldn’t blink at a global flea Armageddon; we’d be pleased to be rid of them. But strangely, when people today see “strongman” fleas on YouTube pulling tiny carts, or “acrobat” fleas walking tightropes; when they are onscreen at a scale we can interact with, magnified like micro movie stars, the reaction to these pests changes: You’re hurting the fleas! The leashes are strangling them! This is animal cruelty! Keep in mind, in their own homes, chances are these people would crush a flea dead in an instant and fumigate for good measure.

  Here’s the thing: as giants, human beings have a tendency to treat small life as though it’s insignificant. As flea expert and entomologist Tim Cockerill has observed: “Sometimes, in a city like London, you’ll see the tiniest speck flying across the room or landing on the table, or in your beer at the pub, and most people don’t think of this as a life. They’ll just pick it out and flick it away, like it’s a bit of dust or soot or whatever, but that’s actual animal diversity. If you take a moment to look at that speck, it opens up a whole new world.”

  And it’s true. In fact, whole new species have been discovered in this way.*1

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  ROBERT HOOKE WAS AN INTELLECTUAL GIANT, but crippled with scoliosis and Pott’s disease, he was also a hunchback. Regarded by some as the Leonardo da Vinci of England, he made a staggering number of contributions in the fields of astronomy, biology, physics, paleontology, and even architecture. Early on, he developed the wave theory of light, proved the existence of air, defined the limits of human vision, discovered and named the cell, deduced that fossils were the remains of once-living things, and proposed the idea, inconceivable at the time, that species could disappear through extinction. But today, he is best known for one iconic drawing: a magnified illustration of a flea.

  Folding out over four pages, and “depicted with the anatomical precision of a rhinoceros,” as Oxford historian Allan Chapman wrote, the magnified beast was a centrefold from Hooke’s 1665 bestseller, Micrographia. And while Hooke’s notoriously difficult personality made him unpopular with fellow academics,*2 his book at least made him very popular with the public. In it, he presented the wonders of the magnified world: illustrations of bee stingers, fly’s feet, snail’s teeth (they have over twenty thousand of them), and even mites in cheese. The detail of the pictures would still baffle most today, but for people introduced to these “minute bodies” for the very first time, the book was nothing short of mind-blowing.

  Because of Micrographia, the flea was elevated to a microscopic muse. And inspired by Hooke’s illustrations another man set his sights on delving even deeper into the world of the minuscule. Grinding finer and finer lenses until his vision was magnified over 270 times,*3 Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was a contemporary of Hooke’s whose powerful homemade microscopes were so good they landed him the title of “father” of a new field: microbiology.

  With the ability to zoom into the level of a micron, or one-millionth of a metre, Van Leeuwenhoek was able to see well beyond the capacity of the naked eye. And so it was that one day, while examining a few drops of rainwater that had collected in a pot, he made an earth-shattering discovery. Wiggling beneath his eyes, at a stupendously small scale, were little creatures swimming through the liquid. They were smaller than anything he had ever seen. He named them animalcules.

  It’s important to keep in mind that what we call micro-organisms today did not officially exist in the 1600s. Van Leeuwenhoek was the first to access a world that was previously invisible to the human eye. So when in 1673 he began documenting his findings in a series of letters to the Royal Society in London, leading scientists of the day weren’t just skeptical, they thought he was either hallucinating or possibly insane.

  What Van Leeuwenhoek had on his side, however, was that he was prolific. And as he began looking closely at everyday things, they transformed into magnified wonders. In 1673, he focused his lens on the life force moving through all of us by putting a drop of his own blood under the microscope. The liquid, it turned out, contained solids: flowing through our veins he saw blood cells, which he described as concave “globules.”

  In 1677, he spied an entirely new life form and discovered protozoa. Creatures “so small, in my sight, that I judged that even if 100 of these very wee animals lay stretched out one against another, they could not reach to the length of a grain of coarse sand.” That same year, he made his greatest personal discovery when he examined another body fluid, his own ejaculate. He became the first person to witness living sperm cells, magnified and “moving like a snake or like an eel swimming in water.”

  Writing to the Royal Society on September 17, 1683, Van Leeuwenhoek had turned his detective work to dental hygiene. Observing the plaque, or “white matter,” between his teeth, he pried opened a portal to a whole new dimension: “I then most always saw, with great wonder, that in the said matter there were many very little living animalcules, very prettily a-moving. The biggest sort…had a very strong and swift motion
, and shot through the water (or spittle) like a pike does through the water. The second sort…oft-times spun round like a top…and these were far more in number.”

  There, in his mouth, he had uncovered a metropolis of life at the most distant frontier of the microscopic world. They are still the tiniest living beings that we know of today. He had discovered bacteria.*4

  But in the scientific community, there were still strong doubts about Van Leeuwenhoek’s brazen claims. In a letter to Robert Hooke, the Dutchman wrote, “I suffer many contradictions and oft-times hear it said that I do but tell fairy tales about the little animals.” And so the Royal Society called upon the eminent Hooke to replicate and confirm Van Leeuwenhoek’s discoveries.

  Hooke had looked through a microscope before, but when he reached Van Leeuwenhoek’s magnification, what he saw was baffling and “exceeded belief.” And yet it was true. In his letter to the Royal Society, he reported,

  I have here sent the Testimonials of eight credible persons; some of which affirm they have seen 10000, others 30000, others 45000 little living creatures, in a quantity of water as big as a grain of Millet (92 of which go to the making up the bigness of a green Pea, or the quantity of a natural drop of water)….If according to some of the included testimonials there might be found in a quantity of water as big as a millet seed, no less than 45000 animalcules. It would follow that in an ordinary drop of this water there would be no less than 4140000 living creatures, which number if doubled will make 8280000 living Creatures seen in the quantity of one drop of water, which quantity I can with truth affirm I have discerned.

  Under the microscope’s glass lens, a tiny window had swung wide open, and the universe it revealed was gigantic.

  * * *

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  WE TEND TO FORGET that on the scale of living things we are massive. To us, reality may appear human-sized, but in truth 95 percent of all animal species are smaller than the human thumb. Even tiny animals like fleas are giants compared to the microscopic life forms that inhabit them. As the old rhyme “Siphonaptera” puts it, “Big fleas have little fleas, / Upon their backs to bite ’em, / And little fleas have lesser fleas, / And so, ad infinitum.” In essence, even our pests have pests. Given that, it’s worth taking a moment to consider exactly what a “pest” is. The term implies a small creature whose very existence and mode of survival is a nuisance. Fleas are only one of a vast number of species we despise. And for good reason: the rat flea notoriously served as the carrier of the Yersinia pestis bacterium that killed millions of people around the world, most notably in connection with the Black Death, the pandemic that peaked in Europe in the fourteenth century.*5 Because of this, some people have questioned if there is even a point to the flea’s existence. As one commenter wrote online, “There are those creatures that serve no purpose whatsoever. Fleas are such an example. They don’t pollinate any flowers, nor do they prey on any destructive or harmful insects. Instead, they siphon the blood of unsuspecting animals and people all the while passing harmful organisms into their bloodstream!” But the flea is not alone in being deemed “unworthy” of being alive. We hold similar attitudes towards cockroaches, mosquitoes, mites, bedbugs, wasps, ants, silverfish, spiders, flies, and many other unwelcome critters anywhere near our homes. We decide which animals should live and which should die. We divide animals into those we admire or that benefit us—insects that are beautiful or have a “purpose,” like butterflies and bees—and those we’d prefer to exterminate, especially where they compete for our food in the realm of agriculture.