Could a chair evolve? Are cities biology? And who is the sultan of Facebookistan? Yes, it can only be the start of this year's TED Global conference in Edinburgh, the annual mindfest that brings together some of the world's smartest scientists, biggest thinkers, and most innovative do-ers to share their "ideas worth spreading".
It's an undeniably exclusively affair - tickets cost nearly £4,000 and prime ministers and Hollywood actresses tend to drop by - but what TED does best is nerds. Forget Glastonbury, this is Nerdstock, where for a week, neuroscientists and quantum physicists get to act like rock stars (think standing ovations, mass adulation, and the tantalising possibility of groupie sex).
But then, TED is nothing if not ambitious: this year's theme? It's just the small matter of "The stuff of life".
Rebecca Mackinnon of the international bloggers' network Global Voices Online claims it's starting to act like one. Private companies, she argues, are exerting the kind of control and power that previously only governments had. They're applying censorship (like Apple did in Israel where it banned a Palestinian app), or responding to requests from regimes (as Apple again did in China where it pulled a Dalai Lama app) and creating what she calls "a new layer of private sovereignty".
In the old days, there were nation states; in the new world order there are supra-national corporations that are exercising power without restraint. Just as the American Declaration of Independence inaugurated the concept of the "consent of the governed", she says, we need to insist upon a "consent of the networked".
What is the minimal unit of matter that can undergo Darwinian evolution? The answer, according to Lee Cronin, professor of chemistry at Glasgow University, is a single cell, and this raises a whole host of questions. Questions such as, what is life? Is biology special? Is matter 'evolvable'? And if we can make stuff that mimics life, can we then make life? Cronin thinks so.
What is the likelihood that somewhere in the universe there is non-carbon-based life? Just about 100%, he says. In his laboratory, he's trying to create inorganic life using a whole host of different reactive formats. "We're coming very close to understanding the key steps that makes dead stuff come alive," he says.
He sounds a warning, though. There are biohazards to consider: "If your pen could replicate, that could be a bit of a problem."
Algorithms are no longer just a set of instructions that tell a computer what to do. They've become a force in their own right, according to Kevin Slavin, the co-founder of games company Area/Code. The world has now become a place where algorithms battle each other for supremacy. The financial markets now consist of one set of algorithms trying to outsmart another set, and nobody can be exactly sure any more of what it exactly is that we're doing. "We've lost the sense of what's actually happening in this world that we've made."
He cites the example of the "Flash Crash", when at 2.42pm on 6 May last year, 9% of the Dow Jones index simply disappeared "and nobody knew where it went". No person was in control; it was simply a bunch of computer algorithms battling it out against each other. This, he says, is not information: it's culture.
"It is fun!" according Yves Rossy, a Swiss airline pilot who regularly straps on a pair of wings, leaps out of an aircraft and turns his body into a fuselage. The wings have their own jet pack but no steering or brakes: to gain altitude he arches his back, and when he wants to go into a dive, he pushes his shoulders down.
"With this little harness and these little wings, I have the feeling to be almost a bird!"
Watch him here in action flying over the Grand Canyon.
Or possibly Japan. Because if it's social mobility you're after, the USA (followed closely by the UK) is the worst place to live on Earth, according to Richard Wilkinson, professor emeritus of social epidemiology at the University of Nottingham.
His research has shown that the more unequal a country - ie, the greater the gap between rich and poor - the less people trust each other, the more heart disease they suffer, the greater number of murders there are, and the higher level of mental illness they suffer.
Status anxiety, according to Wilkinson, isn't some sort of existential malaise: it affects all people in all walks of life and entire nation states. If you really want to tackle diabetes or teenage pregnancy, or infant mortality, or depression, he argues, then you need to restrain City bonuses and raise taxes.
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