There are occasions in life when you know you are about to head seriously out of your depth. Mine came last week at Keble College, Oxford, when I sat down next to a beardy scientist whose name tag identified him as Craig.
"What do you do, Craig?" I asked.
Craig, it turned out, sequenced the human genome.
Later, I chatted to someone called Nick, who claimed it "might be quite simple" to ensure that couples never fell out of love.
"Perhaps with a small pill to moderate our hormones," he explained. "We can already do it with prairie voles."
Nick has a strong German accent and a nervous manner but then, as a woman called Shannaz tells me confidentially: "The problem with some of the people here is that they're so brilliant they're almost retarded."
I suspect she's just trying to make us both feel a little better.
"Here" is TED, which is a conference. Sort of. Actually, it's quite difficult to describe precisely what TED is. It stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design, but it's about more than any of those subjects. What it resembles most closely is a G8 of the mind, a high-powered ideas fest that crosses disciplines and ideas in what the New York Times calls "three-and-a-half days of intellectual soul searching." According to technology magazine redherring.com, it attracts "some of the smartest, richest and most talented people on Earth," and the stated aim, this time around, was to find "Ideas Big Enough to Change the World."
Which sounds, well, if not hopelessly ambitious, faintly implausible. But almost everybody does seem to have a big idea. In fact, some of them are huge.
How to solve global poverty using mobile phones. How to finance manned space travel. How to live forever.
Over four days, 39 main speakers, most of whom are world leaders in their field, compress their ideas into 18-minute-long whiz-bang talks before a slightly stunned-looking 300-strong audience. If it all sounds suspiciously unBritish, it's because it is. TED was set up in the US in 1984 and since 1990 has been held annually in Monterey, California.
But last week's event, TEDGlobal, was the first time it's ever been attempted in Britain, part of a master plan to make it less American and more international.
In 1984, it introduced the world to the first Macintosh computer and the first CD-Rom. It spawned the magazine Wired and the academic institution that became the accelerator of the digital age, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's media lab.
It's regularly attended by the likes of Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Jeff Bezos (who founded Amazon) and Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin. In between the talks are performances by musicians such as Thomas Dolby, who was instrumental in introducing the synthesizer into pop, and Talvin Singh. And then, after that, there are parties. TED is less a conference, more an avant garde cultural "happening" as staged by the masters of the universe.
The self-styled "curator" of TED is Chris Anderson, an Englishman who made a fortune with Future Publishing and set up the Sapling Foundation, whose mission is to "leverage the power of ideas, media and markets" into life-sustaining projects, mostly in the developing world. Three years ago, he bought TED from Richard Saul Wurman, the flamboyant entrepreneur who founded it, and turned the whole thing into a non-profit venture with somewhat worthier aims. On the first day of the Oxford conference, he leaps on stage and, in a slightly earnest voice, says West Coasty things like: "Let the magic happen," and "it's all in the conversation."
But it probably all is in the conversations, because they are amazing. It's just that they're all conducted at a scarily high level. A sampling of the speakers -- none of whom is paid; they come because they want to be there -- includes Richard "The Selfish Gene" Dawkins; the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy "I'm trying to bring the entire sum of human knowledge to within the grasp of the entire population of the world" Wales; architect William "Did I tell you that I'm designing seven entirely sustainable Chinese cities from scratch and the Chinese government has just adopted my teachings as state policy?" McDonough; Aubrey "There is no reason why within the next 10 years we can't figure out how to extend the lifetime of the people sitting here to 150 years and within that 150 years, we'll figure out how to extend it to a 1,000 years" de Grey, a Cambridge geneticist; Afghan Finance Minister Ashraf "I'm rebuilding my country's infrastructure, but let me tell you it's pretty tricky because you lot are so bloody selfish and just don't give a damn" Ghani; and David "There are about a trillion parallel universes out there and I've got the proof" Deutsch, an Oxford physicist.
There is, inevitably, a lot of crazy scientist hair going down. De Grey has the best beardy look -- ZZ Top meets Gandalf -- although my favorite mad scientist is Deutsch, who explains the "multiverse" with a rather touching confidence that I'll understand: "In most of these parallel universes, there will be jet aeroplanes, although in the universes in which dinosaurs didn't die out, they will be dinosaur jet aeroplanes."
"Does that mean that there is another universe in which there is somebody who looks like me and has my name but understands quantum physics?" I ask him.
"Yes," he says. "There is."
According to the Wall Street Journal, the conference has a knack for introducing the world to the Next Big Thing. This time round, gadget-wise, it may or may not be a weird little wi-fi rabbit whose ears light up and swivel around and that is apparently the first step towards us "communicating via objects."
It's a wireless means of being connected to the Internet 24 hours a day or, as the man from the French manufacturer tells me: "It will read you the news, or the traffic report or your e-mails. And if you marry your rabbit to another one, they can send each other love letters."
"It doesn't have to be a rabbit, though," he says. "It could be a coffee table."
"Your coffee table would be able to talk to you?" I ask.
"Yes," he says. "It could teach you Italian."
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