The ability of people to connect with each other — for better or worse — was a recurring theme at this year’s TEDx.

Bringing the spirited celebration of ideas to Bermuda is no easy job.

“It’s been the toughest one ever,” organiser John Narraway told the packed auditorium at The Fairmont Southampton Resort on Saturday.

The good news may have struck some Bermuda residents as surprising, but the Island is one of the world’s happier places, according to Martijn Burger, academic director at the Erasmus Happiness Economics Research Organisation.

Although many in the developed world are nonetheless “haunted by a sense of decline”, Bermuda still ranks 7.7 on the organisation’s zero to ten scale of happiness.

The batteries on electric cars have the power to help support the power grid itself, the conference heard from Tom Gage, one of the minds behind the vehicles, while Radhika Nagpal, a Harvard robotics scientist, described how tiny machines are acquiring the behaviour of “autonomous swarms” witnessed in nature, from the mounds built by termites to the synchronised flocking of birds.

Martha Dismont, of Family Centre attested to the power of empathy and respect in building bridges between people.

Local artist Michael Frith, who co-created the hit puppet show Fraggle Rock, described how Jim Henson had tasked him with “creating a show for kids that will save the world” — subtly illustrating differences in cultures between invented worlds that nonetheless depended upon one another.

Interconnectedness returned with Clilly Castiglia, who demonstrated the power of big-screen games to interact with crowds of up to 20,000 people.

In a moving presentation, puppeteers Johnie McGlade and Kathleen Mullen of No Strings International showed how their work with puppets teaches children how to navigate everyday threats in some of the more dangerous parts of the world.

The dark side of connectivity was detailed by Stuart Lacey, of Bermuda’s own technology firm Trunomi.

The bad news is that our digital legacies are being watched online far more keenly than we realise, all with the aim of selling products — but consumers can ultimately cut out the middle man of advertisers to share their data with the outlets they prefer, in return for a discount.

The arts also took the stage: In Motion school of dance opened the conference, and Bermuda poet Yesha Townsend’s free-form monologue on the meaning of home brought the audience to its feet.

Captain Barrington Irving recounted his journey out of one of Miami’s worst neighbourhoods to become a pilot.

In defiance of everything he was taught to believe, Captain Irving was determined to fly solo around the world to show other young people that it could be done.

Breaking the age record at 23 by doing exactly that, Captain Irving next created the “flying classroom”, using expeditions to bring the tangible powers of science and maths to students in other countries.

It closed on a light note with Bryan Davis, head of the distillery Lost Spirits, who cheerfully described harnessing a teenage fondness for home-brew into a self-taught discovery of a technique to age spirits in a matter of days, instead of decades in a barrel.

According to Mr Davis, his creation will be launched later this month. Ten per cent of world spirits distributors are already interested.

“I’m not actually a chemist,” Mr Davis added, summing up the spirit of the conference. “Everything I know, I picked up from Google.”