The Reality Bubble

by Ziya Tong

  The threat is just as real as the system is real. Real in the sense, to paraphrase Philip K. Dick, that our problems are not going to go away if we just stop believing in them. But systems—as solid as they may seem—are still built upon our collective thinking, our ways of seeing the world. That being the case, they can change, but only if we change the thinking behind them. As Robert Pirsig put it in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, “If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves.”

  What we need, urgently, is a way out of this hall of mirrors. And we can find it with science, because science can shatter old world views. It can literally change the world by changing the way we see.

  The greatest minds in history were rebellious thinkers like Galileo, Darwin, and Einstein. We know their names because they were bold, scientific revolutionaries who defied majority opinion and reshaped our understanding of the world. We are the lucky inheritors of their radical thought. Galileo proved that Earth revolves around the sun, and now we know we are not the centre of the universe. Darwin connected the dots of life, proving that animals are our relatives, that we are part of a long evolution of life, not separate from but rather connected to all other living beings. And Einstein flipped the script on the dimensions, proving that space-time is relative to the observer and there is no such thing as fixed, absolute time or space.

  These big shifts in thinking could hardly be derived from common sense. In fact, they run counter to what we perceive about the world with our physical senses. Writing about Carl Sagan’s work, literary critic Maria Popova likewise observed that,

  We navigate the world by our common-sense perception, but that perception has blinded us to reality again and again. We have mistaken our sensorial intuitions for facts of the universe—for millennia, we held wrong beliefs about Earth’s shape, motion, and position, because it feels flat and static beneath our feet, and central to the order of the cosmos. We have mistrusted processes and phenomena beyond the boundaries of what we can touch and feel with our limited senses—from evolution, which unfolds on scales of time too vast to be visible within a human lifetime, to quantum mechanics, which operates on subatomic scales imperceptible and almost inconceivable to the human observer.

  Our senses tell us we are separate from the universe and the environment and other living beings. Science, however, presents the evidence to prove that our physical perceptions are wrong. That is the great gift of science and scientists: they are reality testers; they can pierce through our blind spots with evidence that provides a clearer, more objective view of the world. The greatest scientists in the world are remembered because they burst our reality bubble.

  It’s been said that hindsight is 20/20, and nowhere is this truer than in science, where old ideas about reality seem ludicrous to us now. In his groundbreaking book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Harvard-trained physicist Thomas Kuhn says he found his inspiration to write after studying the work of Aristotle. Kuhn observed that the intellectual giant “appeared not only ignorant of mechanics, but a dreadfully bad physical scientist as well.” Further, “About motion, in particular, his writings seemed to me full of egregious errors, both of logic and of observation.”

  Kuhn’s key insight was that a brilliant thinker like Aristotle, by modern standards, looked like a rambling idiot. But Aristotle was operating within a given scientific paradigm; his ideas were shaped by a very particular world view. This was Kuhn’s epiphany, one that led him to coin the term “paradigm shift.” If, in the past, scientific knowledge had been seen as a slow but accumulative process that moved toward a greater understanding of physical reality, Kuhn showed that in fact knowledge grows in giant, discontinuous leaps. Or, to use a different analogy, a caterpillar doesn’t grow into a butterfly, it enters a chrysalis stage, where it dissolves into a genetic soup that reforms into a very different-looking insect but one that still has a memory of its earlier being.

  Scientific revolutions, for Kuhn, are these dramatic shifts in thinking. But he was keen to point out that scientific advances are not like visual gestalts, for example, where one’s perception of a single image can shift back and forth between two seemingly different things. It is a bigger shift, he writes, than mere illusion: “The marks on paper that were first seen as a bird are now seen as an antelope, or vice versa. That parallel can be misleading. Scientists do not see something as something else; instead, they simply see it.” The distinction is critically important. As the philosopher of science Ian Hacking notes, “The cautious will gladly say that one’s view of the world changes, but the world stays the same. Kuhn wanted to say something more interesting. After a revolution, scientists, in the field that has been changed, work in a different world.”

  We too live in a different world because of these scientific revolutions. Our collective minds have changed because of what we’ve learned. Though there are, of course, those who refuse to see what science sees, who trust only their human senses: the flat-earthers and creationists who expect all the fruits of the modern world while refusing to abandon long-obsolete beliefs.

  Humanity’s greatest thinkers, however, are those who push the boundaries of sight; they are visionaries in the truest sense of the word because they see what for the rest of us is invisible. For Newton, it was the invisible force of gravity; for Van Leeuwenhoek, it was the invisible animalcules; for Copernicus and Galileo, it was the invisible movement of our still Earth around the sun. As Kuhn was aware, scientists regularly work with “theoretical entities, such as electrons, [observing things] at which one cannot point”; they regularly work in a world that is invisible.

  Consequently, there is often a gap between what science sees and the lay person understands. With access to modern technological tools, scanning electron microscopes, mass spectrometers, and fMRIs, scientists can see what the rest of us cannot, and this, in addition to highly focused expertise, results in a significant knowledge gap between scientists and the public. In a recent poll by the Pew Research Center and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the majority of Americans, 79 percent, agreed that scientists and scientific knowledge are invaluable, and yet similar polls have demonstrated that a significant number do not rely on science to support their own views. In a 2013 poll, for instance, only 33 percent of the general public believed climate change to be a serious problem, compared to 77 percent of AAAS scientists, a yawning gap of 44 percentage points.*4 Another reason for the big difference has to do with how science is communicated to the general public. Here, even language can have a significant effect. When scientists say there is “uncertainty” about an effect, the public takes that to mean a lack of knowledge, where a better translation of the term as it is used scientifically would be “range.” Similarly, when scientists speak of “positive feedbacks” when it comes to climate change, the public thinks of a good result or positive praise, when in practice it means a self-reinforcing cycle.

  Big ideas also take time to transmit, because people are stubborn in their beliefs. Even a century after Copernicus’s death, his bold ideas had few converts. And while Newton’s groundbreaking proofs were well documented in his Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, it was over half a century before his ideas were generally accepted. Nobel Prize–winning physicist Max Planck similarly lamented that “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

  Though Planck was no doubt right, we don’t have a generation to figure this out. And Planck didn’t have the fortune to live in the high-speed, connected world of today, where we have the power to read, share, and communicate new ideas with one another instantly.

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  SINCE 1972, ONLY TWENTY-FOUR PEOPLE have gone beyond low Earth orbit and seen the planet whole. NASA’s space shuttle missions, along with expeditions to the International Space Station and China’s Tiangong stations, have increased that number, but still only just over five hundred people have had the grand privilege of seeing Earth from space. Or put another way: 0.0000072 percent of the human population has seen this magnificent view.

  Of those who have made that journey, some have reported a massive shift in their perspective. It even has a name, the overview effect, a “space consciousness” that causes a deep and profound change in thinking allowing the astronauts to see their earthly home in a new way. Physicians who studied the returning travellers reported that “for many of them, it’s given them a particular attitude about themselves and their relationship to others. Some became more aware of the earth itself, all of them have developed a new sense of the order of the universe. And those of us who have been close to them have developed the same kind of reactions even though we haven’t been there ourselves.” Unlike us, on the International Space Station (ISS), men and women witness sixteen sunrises and sunsets a day. But what’s even more incredible is that as they look down, our earthly clocks and borders lose their meaning, even though the ISS is a mere 400 kilometres away.

  Astronauts also literally see the revolutions of our planet. They see it spin beneath their feet, and their eyes take in the magnitude of its beauty along with the scale of its destruction. In one revolution of Earth, they can bear witness to the deforestation, the droughts, the wildfires, the melting icecaps, the hurricanes, and the pollution. Up in space, the human footprint on Earth is not some abstract thing. It is not data. It is visible.

  From space, even the bubble is real. You can see it as the thin bluish-white curve that protects us from the radiation of outer space. Known as the atmosphere, it is the bubble that protects all life on Earth. But the bubble is also a trap. And as scientists tell us, the rate at which CO2 is increasing in the atmosphere is accelerating, and it is largely human-caused emissions of these heat-trapping gases that are responsible for global warming.

  But it doesn’t require a space-bound epiphany for us to be aware of what we are doing to our home. And while the overview effect occurs for some, in truth it is a phenomenon not experienced by many astronauts. As the astronaut Chris Hadfield once told me, it is not the cupola view from the International Space Station that changes your perspective but rather your own thoughts and life experience. In other words, you don’t need to go to space to see the world differently. You can see it with fresh eyes from right here.

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  IN TRANSFORMING OURSELVES, we transform the world. In transforming the world, we transform ourselves. As Joseph Campbell detailed in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, this theme can be found throughout the ages, in many parts of the world. It is the universal story of the hero’s journey, and it underlies our most powerful epics, from ancient Greek myths to Hollywood blockbusters like Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, or The Matrix.

  In essence, the hero’s journey unfolds in a cycle, or a single revolution. It begins with the hero living an ordinary life in an ordinary world, only to have it all upturned one day when they discover that the world they took for granted has suddenly changed. They find themselves in “an unfamiliar, special world” and must cast aside the status quo, become a seeker of new knowledge. This knowledge is used to battle the trials and challenges the hero will face as their normal way of life increasingly comes under threat. At a certain point, all may seem lost and defeat may seem inevitable, but then, in the final moments, a new insight or revelatory power takes hold, allowing the hero to prevail and make a triumphant return. Now, the hero heads home, this time embracing a new outlook. And while the world may still outwardly appear the same, for the hero it has completely changed.

  It’s almost as though these epic stories have been preparing us for this very moment. We have reached a time where each of us must rise to the challenges that confront us. It is time for us to change. And while most people still live in the “ordinary world,” for those who can see, it’s clear that impending doom lurks not far away. Indeed, the cracks in our normalcy are already appearing. Scientists tell us we are on the brink of devastating changes and that the world we live in will soon be under siege. Moreover, if we fail to respond, we will be facing not only localized disasters in the coming decades but civilizational catastrophes.

  On the other hand, it’s something of a cosmic joke that we are all here to face this moment at all. Because frankly, the odds against it are stupendous. As Stephen Hawking pointed out in A Brief History of Time, the existence of life on Earth required implausibly perfect conditions in the universe: “If the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, it would have re-collapsed before it reached its present size.” In a similar vein, biologist Ken Miller writes, “If g [the gravitational constant] were smaller, the dust from the big bang would just have continued to expand, never coalescing into galaxies, stars, planets, or us. The value of the gravitational constant is just right for the existence of life. A little bigger, and the universe would have collapsed before we could evolve; a little smaller, and the planet upon which we stand would never have formed.”

  These are just two examples from over two hundred physical parameters in the solar system and universe that needed to be almost perfect for life to have had a chance to evolve. But the odds against your particular existence are even greater.

  Ali Binazir, a graduate of Cambridge University, decided to calculate the odds of any one of us being born. Factoring in the chances of your parents meeting (one in twenty thousand) and the chances of them staying together in order to conceive you (one in two thousand), the basic odds of your birth start at around one in forty million. But that’s before including biological odds. With your mother producing over one hundred thousand eggs in her lifetime and your father producing four trillion sperm in his, the chances of you, in particular, being here (as opposed to your brother or sister) works out to about one in four hundred quadrillion.

  But we have to look back further than just your parents, because genetically you belong to an unbroken chain of familial lineage that goes back over 150,000 human generations. Binazir works out those odds to be in the order of 1 in 1045,000, too long a number to write out fully on this page, or even this chapter. In fact, it’s a number “not just larger than all of the particles in the universe—it is larger than all of the particles in the universe if each particle were itself a universe.” To put that in perspective, the probability of your existence is equivalent to “the probability of 2 million people getting together…each to play a game of dice with trillion-sided dice. They each roll the dice and they all come up with the exact same number.” Meaning, “The odds that you exist at all are: basically zero.”

  Think about that. In the grand scheme of reality, you have arrived on Earth, at the right place, at the right time, only to appear exactly on the eve of the planetary apocalypse?

  Really, it’s too perfect. Even Hollywood couldn’t dream up a better plot. And you, the hero of this story, couldn’t find yourself in a more epic, exquisite, or extraordinary tale.

  *1 “Populations of vertebrate animals—such as mammals, birds, and fish—have declined by 58% between 1970 and 2012.”

  *2 According to Donella Meadows, a pioneer of systems thinking, a system can be defined as “a set of things—people, cells, molecules, or whatever—that are interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time.”

  *3 In a letter entitled “World Scientists’ Warning To Humanity” more than 1,500 leading scientists and Nobel laureates put their names to the following caution:

  “Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course…If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wi
sh for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know.

  *4 The share of the general public saying that global warming is a very serious problem has fluctuated in Pew Research polling between a low of 32 percent in 2010 to a high of 47 percent in 2009.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Writing a book is a solitary process but it is not something you can do alone. First, I am indebted to my brilliant editor Nick Garrison. He, along with my indefatigable agent Rick Broadhead, were the first to believe in this book. Thank you both for your wisdom, excellence, advice and kindness. I would also like to thank the entire Penguin Random House Canada team, specifically: Kristin Cochrane and Nicole Winstanley, Kara Savoy, Tonia Addison, Paisley McNab and Scott Loomer, and my terrific copy editor Alex Schultz. This being my first book, all of their support has been deeply appreciated.

  I am also very grateful to the scientists, academics, journalists, researchers and friends who shared their time and expertise. My thanks to: Mark Abbott, Nobu Adilman, Malcolm Clench, Tim Cockerill, Biella Coleman, Martin Fowler, Jonas Frisén, Michael Gillard, David Grimm, Jay Ingram, Peter Jakobs, Naomi Klein, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, Jo-Anne McArthur, Alan Nazerian, Dan and Shelby Riskin, Bob Rutledge, Joel Solomon, Jan Sorgenfrei, Nigel J.T. Smith, David Suzuki, Astra Taylor and WWF Canada.