The Reality Bubble

by Ziya Tong

  Measurements have not only been subject to the whims of history, they have also differed from country to country, and even from place to place within a country. As Ken Alders writes in The Measure of All Things, in pre-revolutionary France, it was estimated “that under the cover of some eight hundred names, the Ancien Régime of France employed a staggering 250,000 different units of weights and measures.” It was also the French, however, who came up with the first “universal” standards of measurement, setting up the metric system that most of us use today.

  When the French Revolution crushed the monarchy, it also dropped the guillotine down on antiquated thinking. Gone was the old hodgepodge of measures. The French set up a new system that they declared would “be for all people, for all time.” Their big idea was to remove the human body—and the complexities of the human form—as the primary site of perspective and instead base new units of measurement on something more universal: our planetary body. The endeavour was huge.

  In the summer of 1792, two astronomers, Jean-Baptiste Delambre and Pierre Méchain, set off from Paris in opposite directions. Delambre headed north, while his colleague Méchain headed south. They had an incredibly ambitious goal: to be the first men to measure the world. To accomplish this, they would survey the meridian arc from Dunkirk to Barcelona, which passed through Paris. Extrapolating from that measurement, they would then find the distance from the equator to the North Pole.

  It was, and remains to this day, an astounding feat. Using platinum rods to survey the line of longitude, the pair calculated that the distance from the North Pole to the equator was ten million metres, and hailed that the metre would be defined as one ten-millionth of the distance between the pole and equator. Based on satellite measurements, we now know that the exact distance is 10,002,290 metres. Delambre and Méchain were off the mark only by a couple of kilometres, meaning their calculation of a metre was accurate to within 0.2 millimetres, or about the width of two strands of human hair.

  This measure of Earth was forged in platinum, and on June 22, 1799, a prototype of this metre, called the “mètre des Archives,” was placed in the National Archives in Paris. Soon, copies of the metre would be exported to other countries for their use. But a complication arose. Copies could be scuffed and were prone to wear and tear. So instead, a new metre, called the international prototype metre (IPM), was born. This platinum-iridium bar would instead reflect a “line standard.” On it were two marks giving the measure of one metre, avoiding the problem of having the metre damaged at the ends. The IPM would now be housed at the newly instituted Bureau International des Poids et Mesures, just outside Paris, in Sèvres. This became the “official” metre and would soon be copied and used by more than thirty countries.

  As you may recall from the fire at the British Houses of Parliament, however, there was still a problem with a physical representation of an abstract thing. The “real” metre (that represented all the others) could still be damaged. And so the platinum metre, as the standard for the metric system, needed to be protected. In Sèvres, a complex system of fire alarms and anti-theft devices guarded the metre. In later czarist Russia, official measurements were likewise kept secure in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg. But even these elaborate precautions were not secure enough. As Witold Kula writes, “The thought that someday, through an earthquake or a calamitous fire, the world might be ‘without the meter’ was indeed a nightmare. The new regulations, introduced in 1961, have done away with the very concept of ‘standard.’ Today, the true or invariable meter is defined as ‘a length equal to 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of the orange light emitted by the krypton atom of mass 86 in vacuo’ and it is reproducible the world over in any properly equipped scientific laboratory.”

  This was the birth of the transfer standard. Instead of measuring a dimension by its humanly observable quantities, the metre became an abstract, invisible, and untouchable thing. As with the measure of time, we became removed from perceiving the very measures of our own making. Measures are now so exact, they can only be achieved with advanced technology. Even the krypton measure is already out of date. Today, the dematerialized metre has yet another definition. With the invention of the laser, space is now not just a measure of light but also a measure of time. Stabilized using molecular iodine, the helium-neon laser defines the twenty-first-century metre, as “the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second.”

  This all seems highly complex for something that should be so simple. After all, as anyone who’s shopped at IKEA knows, most of us still measure objects with our hands and feet. But that’s the thing about measurement: it defines everything about our world and yet we don’t think about it or its origins at all. Quietly, however, measurements shape the very system we live in. As Ken Alders writes, “Measurement is one of our most ordinary actions. We speak its language whenever we exchange precise information or trade objects with exactitude. This very ubiquity, however, makes measurement invisible. To do their job, standards must operate as a set of shared assumptions, the unexamined background against which we strike agreements and make distinctions. So it is not surprising that we take measurement for granted and consider it banal.”

  This banality is formalized into the accepted “way things are.” The boundless world becomes a measured world. Our personal relationship to space changes. Space becomes a thing. It becomes a blind spot. But we don’t question the abstraction. And so, over time, the way we structure space begins to seem natural or inevitable to us. But as we shall see next, measurement not only defines the boundaries of our world, it also defines who occupies it.

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  TODAY, THE U.S. ARMY trains on battlefields known as synthetic training environments (STEs). Already, the army has developed virtual versions of North Korea, South Korea, New York, San Francisco, and Las Vegas as simulated training grounds, full 3-D replicas generated from real environments. The ability to make high-precision measurements is vital, because they flip reality inside out. Here, the map unfolds and becomes the territory.

  The idea is that army units can know a battle terrain well in advance should they ever need to set foot on the ground. And while the technology has improved, it isn’t new. Already in a 1993 Wired magazine article, science fiction author Bruce Sterling wrote of how the military was using virtual space to conquer its real counterpart:

  Project 2851 is about the virtual reproduction and archiving of the entire planet. Simulator technology has reached a point today in which satellite photographs can be transformed automatically into 3-D virtual landscapes. These landscapes can be stored in databases, then used as highly accurate training grounds for tanks, aircraft, helicopters, SEALS, Delta Force commandos. What does this mean? It means that soon there will be no such thing as “unknown territory” for the United States military. In the future…the United States military will know the entire planet just like the back of its hand. It will know other countries better than they know themselves.

  If the idea of having your city virtually mapped by the Pentagon makes you a little uneasy, you may want to spare a moment for those who, over the centuries, saw Europeans arriving with astrolabes and transits and other cartographer’s tools. Whether they were Spaniards in Peru, Frenchmen on the St. Lawrence, Englishmen in Africa, or Mason and Dixon themselves traversing the United States, agents of foreign powers inevitably arrived following the making of their maps, and violence often ensued.

  But cartography is also used to maintain peace and reconcile competing interests in a civilized manner. Today, the Arctic—with US$35 trillion worth of oil, as well as fishing and mineral wealth, entombed beneath the ice and water—has become a point of strategic interest. Five nations—the United States, Canada, Norway, Denmark (Greenland), and Russia—have territorial claims that reach into the polar region. So who gets what?

  In maritime law, each country can claim two hundred nautical miles (370.4 kilometres) beyond the
ir shore as an “exclusive economic zone.” Underwater, however, there is also the continental shelf, which can “belong” to one nation or another. And so, in cases where the continental margin extends beyond the reach of the law of the seas, nations can further claim another “outer limit,” which is defined as either: “(i) points 60 nautical miles [111 kilometres] from the foot of the continental slope; or (ii) points at which the thickness of sedimentary rocks is at least 1% of the shortest distance from the points in question to the foot of the continental slope.”

  It gets complicated and technical, and it is here that the lines that define sovereignty begin to get muddied. That’s because wherever a continental shelf extends farther than the 200 miles (370.4 kilometres), a country can tack on an additional 350 miles (648 kilometres) from the baseline (or low water mark on shore) or 100 miles (185 kilometres) from where the shelf reaches a 2,500-metre depth. And so Canada filed a submission to the UN to re-evaluate where its continental shelf ends. Russia too has filed a submission, which would overlap with Denmark’s and likely Canada’s submission as well. In the meantime, Denmark and the government of Greenland have also proposed a new “outer limit,” and that one would overlap with Norway’s continental shelf. The lines will tangle over each other like unspooled thread.

  For now, though, while the Arctic ice holds, the friction between nations over resources has yet to heat up. Russia did, however, make a symbolic claim to the North Pole in 2007. In a move that sparked international controversy, Russian scientists travelled 4,300 metres deep below the ice in the Mir 1 and Mir 2 submarines. Their goal was to collect sediment and water samples to scientifically prove the continuity of the seabed as part of the Russian continental shelf. They also planted a one-metre-tall titanium Russian flag on the Lomonosov Ridge, where it still stands in the dark waters under the polar ice.

  But here’s the thing: maps can be wrong even when they’re accurate, because what they really assert is not the bounds of space, but the reach of power. And while geology and hard science were used to justify the Russian claim to the North Pole, for the international community it was not enough to make a convincing case. Interviewed for The Guardian, Kim Holmén, the research director of the Norwegian Polar Institute, rebuked Russia’s claim by saying, “The United States and Europe were at one time connected, the Appalachians and the Scottish mountains are the same geological formation, but Scotland cannot claim the United States is part of its territory because of that. These samples cannot prove once and for all that the whole discussion is over.”

  Canada’s then foreign minister, Peter MacKay, likewise scoffed at Russia’s show of planting a flag, stating, “This isn’t the 15th century. You can’t go around the world and just plant flags and say: ‘We’re claiming this territory.’”

  All of which is true. The continents were once all joined, indisputably. And sticking flags in the ground has not been considered good diplomacy for centuries. But what everyone missed was that the seemingly intractable problem of Arctic sovereignty was not caused by Russian scheming. It was caused by maps. The lines and boundaries that we draw to form nations are arbitrary. That’s not to say that continental shelves are imaginary; they’re quite real.*2 But the idea that they have anything to do with what we call nations is just that, an idea. And the idea that maps confer ownership begins to look pretty ridiculous when two perfectly accurate maps seem to say two different things. In other words, the point isn’t really that one of the maps might be wrong. It’s that, as a means to settle the question of who owns the rights to the resources under the ice, they can both be wrong.

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  ON JULY 24, 1969, customs officer Ernest Murai processed three special arrivals through Honolulu, Hawaii’s port of entry. The travellers had been out of the country for eight days, which wasn’t particularly unusual. What was unusual was their point of departure. The flight was Apollo 11, and neatly typed on the customs form in the space for the travellers’ place and country of departure, it simply read “Moon.”

  The idea of astronauts returning through customs almost seems like performance art. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins obviously did not need visas or passports when they travelled to the moon, but the moment they returned to Earth they needed stamped pieces of paper to enter. The same is true today on the International Space Station. These space travellers circle the planet freely sixteen times a day, but once they land, NASA must bring them their passports so that they have the right to travel again on Earth.

  When you think about it, it’s remarkable how much power these paper booklets represent, especially considering they are such a recent invention. Today, aside from serving as a form of official identity, they reveal who our allies (and enemies) are on the planet. The most powerful passports grant the greatest freedom, issued by nations that have alliances with many other nations. Individuals who hold passports from Singapore or South Korea, for example, have visa-free access to 163 countries. A passport holder from Afghanistan, however, has access to only 26.

  This imbalance of freedom is not something that people with “good” passports think about. As journalist Kanishk Tharoor writes, “Citizens of Western countries like the US are rarely aware of the enormous luxury of their travel documents. Borders melt at the wafting of an American or British passport; the worst inconvenience is often having to stand in line at the airport to collect a visa.” By contrast, as Tharoor notes, Syrian refugees travelling to Europe journeyed by boat from Turkey to Greece, then had to hike overland on foot through the Balkans into Central Europe. And it’s an expensive journey. A one-way trip of this kind from Syria to Europe costs at least $3,000. But as a Syrian, you can’t hop on an airplane and get a visa processed on arrival.

  Though passports have technically existed in the form of “travelling papers” for centuries (letters from a king promising safe passage date all the way back to 450 BC), the modern passport as we know it dates back only to 1914. In his book Closed Borders, Alan Dowty suggests that this is because until the late nineteenth century the necessary infrastructure simply wasn’t in place. “Few governments” he writes, “actually had comprehensive physical control of their borders; nor did they have bureaucracies sophisticated enough to pick out legal from illegal migrants as they passed through border posts.”

  It was only after the First World War, as empires fractured into smaller nations, that for purposes of security and controlled emigration, the passport came into use. It was a time when countries were far more concerned with people leaving their borders than they were with people coming in. As the writer Stefan Zweig recalls in his autobiography, The World of Yesterday, “Before 1914, the earth had belonged to all….People went where they wished and stayed as long as they pleased. There were no permits, no visas, and it always gives me pleasure to astonish the young by telling them that before 1914 I travelled from Europe to India and America without a passport and without ever having seen one.”

  We did not however, only invent the passport. Before the eighteenth century, the world had no nation-states either. Though they seem permanent at any given moment, borders have shifted dramatically over the centuries. If you were to look at them over the period of a thousand years using time-lapse photography, you’d see them writhing across the land like sine waves, particularly in Europe. And though we tend to assume that borders have the important job of neatly separating whatever is on one side of the line from the other, neighbours in the towns of Baarle-Hertog and Baarle-Nassau, for example, which belong to Belgium and the Netherlands respectively, see things rather differently. Here, the borders are about as well defined as a plate of scrambled eggs, thanks to medieval dukes and lords who traded parcels of land back in the day much like currency. As a result, today within one community there are twenty-two mini-Belgiums that serve as enclaves within the Netherlands, and seven of these parcels of land house mini-Netherlands within them. Which means there are “parts of the Netherlands inside parts of Belgium that are in
side the Netherlands.”

  The town has borders criss-crossing it everywhere. Some borders cut right through bars and restaurants, while others split parks and streets and even residential buildings. Some families have split-nationality homes, with a kitchen in one country and a living room in another. Along borderlines, next-door neighbours will have different cable service providers and different garbage collectors. But that’s not all. “There are two civic governments—which means there are two elections for two mayors. There are also two sets of regional and national elections. There are two postal services. If you mail a letter from one country to another (which, in this case, means across the street), the letter will take a long route out of Baarle to Amsterdam or Brussels before returning to Baarle….And there are two income-tax rates, two electrical systems, two phone systems, two school systems, and two tennis clubs.”

  For a time, the bars on the Dutch side of town closed earlier, and for restaurants that were split in the middle, you could bend the rules by simply ushering patrons over to the Belgian side to continue to eat and drink. But this big tangle of dividing lines also created financial loopholes. And while residents still must obey the borders, there are ways to make the system work for them. Taxes, for instance, are paid to the country in which the front door of the house is located, and so in several cases shopkeepers have moved their front entrance, and thus moved to a new country, in order to pay more favourable rates.

  All this is to say that the invisible lines we draw are powerful, and while they may not always separate people or cultures, they do separate laws.