Unseen Worlds

What we know is shaped by what we’re prepared to perceive

What if the world is changing faster than the lens we’ve been using to understand it?

What if the instability we feel is not evidence of collapse, but of a perceptual system pushing against its edges?

We tend to assume that when familiar narratives fracture, something has gone wrong. That coherence has been lost. But coherence depends on agreement, and agreement depends on what we collectively decide is visible. When the lens shifts, the story must follow.

Over the last few years, as social, political, and cultural systems have begun to strain, something else has been happening alongside them. Biology has been revealing, again and again, that life is more adaptive, more inventive, and more willing to reorganize itself than the frameworks we’ve relied on to explain it.

Which raises an uncomfortable possibility. What feels like disorder may actually be a misalignment between reality and the models we’ve been using to interpret it. Not a failure of life, but a failure of vision.

Reality, it turns out, is always a collaboration. Between organism and environment. Between signal and perception. Between what exists and what we are capable of seeing.

And like all collaborations, it is shaped by what is revealed as much as what is withheld.

Take a discovery that sounds like science fiction but isn’t.

In the radioactive ruins of Chernobyl, fungi have been found thriving where life was once assumed impossible. Certain melanized fungi don’t merely tolerate radiation. They appear to grow more robustly in its presence. Researchers have described a process known as radiosynthesis, in which melanin interacts with ionizing radiation in a way that may help these organisms transduce energy for growth. These fungi are now being studied aboard the International Space Station to observe how they behave in high-radiation environments.

They are not “eating nuclear waste” in a comic-book sense. Nor are they generating clean electricity for us to harvest (yet). But they are doing something far more important. They are demonstrating that life can adapt to conditions we once believed were unequivocally hostile.

So what does it mean when life doesn’t just survive the threat, but reorganizes around it?

There’s an old adage that the only difference between medicine and poison is the dose. It’s a bit glib, but the spirit of it holds. What once appeared dangerous or nonsensical often reveals itself, with time and context, as part of a broader adaptive story. Biology is full of such reversals. Leeches were once considered cutting-edge medicine. Later, dismissed as barbaric. Now cautiously being reconsidered in specific clinical settings. Knowledge, it turns out, evolves not just through discovery, but through recalibration.

Which brings us to another recent revelation.

In 2024, scientists identified a previously unknown organelle inside a marine alga. They call it the nitroplast. This tiny structure allows a eukaryotic organism to fix atmospheric nitrogen internally, a process we long believed only bacteria could perform.

For those who don’t spend their days thinking about cell biology, eukaryotic is the category that includes plants, animals, fungi, and us humans. Complex life. Cells with nuclei. A whole cast of characters we assumed played by certain rules.

But those rules just changed.

An assumption at the foundation of biology turned out to be provisional. A boundary we thought was firm turned out to be porous. A capacity we believed belonged to one class of life has crossed over into another.

The implications are enormous, from agriculture to climate science. But philosophically, they’re even more arresting. If such a fundamental distinction can dissolve under closer inspection, how many other capacities are already present in the world, waiting for the right lens, the right conditions, the right moment to be seen?

Then there are the stranger stories. The ones that sit uncomfortably between lab bench and campfire.

In parts of Asia, reports have recently documented people who consumed a particular bolete mushroom, Lanmaoa asiatica, and experienced vivid hallucinations. Not abstract colors or drifting shapes, but something oddly specific. Small humanoid figures. Often described simply as “little people” by the witnesses of this phenomenon. What makes this remarkable is that the mushroom does not contain the known psychoactive compounds found in psilocybin mushrooms. The mechanism of action remains unidentified. The visions recur across cultures that share no common folklore. The mystery continues.

Science has not validated a shared archetypal explanation, nor should it rush to. But it has acknowledged the phenomenon as real, observed, and not yet understood.

This is where things get delicate.

We needn’t leap to mysticism to honor mystery. It is enough to say that perception is more malleable than we think, and that consciousness remains one of the least mapped territories we inhabit. With a slight tweak to biology or brain chemistry, entire layers of experience may come into view. Not because they were invented, but because they were always just beyond our reach.

Even something as seemingly settled as the color of the sky can remind us of this.

We say the sky is blue. And in a practical sense, it is. But that perception is as much a function of biology as it is of physics. Shorter wavelengths scatter more readily than longer ones in the atmosphere, which means violet and blue light are dispersed across the sky. But our eyes are far less sensitive to violet light, and the sun emits more energy in the blue range than the violet.

Evolution didn’t tune us for accuracy. It tuned us for usefulness. Our vision favors what helps us survive, not what reveals the full truth of the world. Seeing contrast, depth, and motion mattered more than perceiving the full spectrum. So the sky we experience is not the sky in its entirety, but the sky rendered useful.

Which raises an interesting question. Which is more real? The color that exists, or the color our shared perception agrees upon?

Reality, it turns out, is always a collaboration.

But sometimes, collaboration can live in uncomfortable domains of perception.

Recently, the documentary The Age of Disclosure surfaced claims that governments have long possessed credible evidence of non-human intelligence and have deliberately kept it from public view. Not because it could not be understood, but because it could not be easily integrated. The concern, as articulated by those involved, was not mass panic so much as epistemic destabilization. A collapse of certainty across religion, science, geopolitics, and the stories we tell ourselves about human centrality.

Whether one accepts these claims fully, partially, or not at all is almost beside the point. What matters is the pattern. The argument for secrecy mirrors a logic we’ve seen before. That some truths are too disruptive to release into an ecosystem that depends on shared belief structures to function.

In biology, we call this an adaptive response. In institutions, we call it governance. In both cases, information is managed to preserve stability.

Collaboration, after all, can also be a mechanism of containment.

This is the connective tissue between radioactive fungi, nitrogen-fixing organelles, a blue sky, and the possibility of non-human intelligence. Each challenges a boundary we assumed was firm. Each suggests that reality is not neatly partitioned according to our categories. And each reveals that what we know is often less a reflection of what exists than of what our systems are prepared to absorb.

Life adapts first. Understanding follows later. Sometimes much later.

Mystical traditions have suggested for millennia that reality is layered. That what we perceive is not wrong, just partial. Science, at its best, does not contradict this. It refines it. It says yes, and there is more.

More than our instruments once detected.
More than our theories initially allowed.
More than our shared agreements could comfortably hold.

If reality is always a collaboration, then perception is the contract we keep renegotiating. Sometimes expanding it. Sometimes constraining it. Sometimes mistaking containment for coherence.

Which suggests that our work ahead is not only technological, political, or ethical.

It is perceptual.

What else might come into focus if we loosened our grip on certainty, widened our aperture, and allowed ourselves to see not just what is safe to acknowledge, but what has been patiently waiting for us to catch up?

Take good care,

MV

Written with support from AI to refine research, tone, and structure.