Publishing functions very much like the fashion world. Like a suddenly ubiquitous cut of hem or style of trainer, a book comes along every few seasons that hits a nerve, sells well, and spawns a whole host of knock-offs and lookalikes.

Following the huge success of Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, I was afraid that science writer Ziya Tong’s The Reality Bubble might be one of the Sapiens copies – an anthology of interesting facts about the human race that one can quote to friends. A few pages in, her book seems to be just that; it makes some mildly entertaining but not revelatory points about human blindspots, both physical (in the eye), and societal (refusing to believe that the Earth is round). Its premise is only briefly explained, with a worthy quote from Carl Sagan that “our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works”.

After a few pages of porridge eating, some tasty morsels appear, as Tong starts to use ever more gripping examples to make her point about how much we do not see. “To us,” she writes, “reality may appear human-sized, but in truth 95% of all animal species are smaller than the human thumb.”

The matter and life we cannot see are demonstrated with stunning effect. Bacterial cells make up 0.2kg of your body weight; one handful of soil contains more microbes than there are people on Earth; the tiny particles called neutrinos generated by the sun’s nuclear fusion are so small that they can penetrate the Earth, enabling a subterranean observatory to come up with an image of the sun.

The density and frequency of the details showing the scale of life around us almost inspires a feeling of vertigo, so rapidly does Tong make the reader zoom in. By the time I got to the meat slaughter and processed food section (one of our “biological blind spots”), I was so sure Tong was going to hit me with something unfamiliar and horrific that I wasn’t sure I could proceed. She didn’t disappoint: in a gruesome paragraph on poultry processing plants, she provides the detail that chickens are often not mounted properly on the slaughter line before they are immersed in boiling water. The result is that “anywhere from 700,000 to 1 million birds a year are still conscious when they are scalded to death in the scalder”.

Cyanobacteria or ‘blue-green’ algae, which develop at the surface of a slow-flowing river in France.

Photograph: Alamy

In three sections – on biology, society and civilisation – Tong relentlessly focuses on all the things we either do not know, or decide not to pay attention to, as we carry on with our lives. Considering how much she gets through, the tone is light and accessible. It feels like being shown around a fascinating exhibit by an enthusiastic curator. Yet The Reality Bubble is essentially a warning: our blind spots, Tong contends, are responsible for the destruction of our habitat. The little-known facts she entertainingly provides serve the argument that humans have subordinated the elements and the animal kingdom to our will and our desire for consumption, and in doing so have sown the seeds of our own demise.

From a chimpanzee with a photographic memory to beetles that navigate by means of the Milky Way, Tong’s revelatory examples inspire a sense of wonder. In doing so, the author succeeds in highlighting the folly of the idea of human exceptionalism and how, if we are to survive as a species, we need to get very good at scale, and fast. But she doesn’t preach, nailing the “show don’t tell” technique that is so important in such a work. The book doesn’t appeal to a mawkish sympathy for animals, merely showing why there is a balance to nature, while making clear that there is so much about other creatures we are blind to.

Tong also discusses time, space and ownership as initially useful concepts that became co-opted in the march towards efficiency and more profit. In a striking passage she writes that “the illusion of free time is the ouroboros of capitalism. Leisure has entered the marketplace so that it feeds back into the economy”.

By the time Tong (perhaps inevitably) quotes Harari in her conclusion, it is clear that The Reality Bubble is no knock-off but a new addition to the “human journey” genre. It is not just a book that tells a story of humanity; it is a gentle but highly effective wake-up call.

• The Reality Bubble is published by Canongate. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15.