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In October 2009, Stanford University geneticist Anne Brunet was sitting in her office when a graduate student came to her with a slightly heretical question.

A project of the Long Now Foundation, the aim is to make sure we preserve the knowledge contained in dying languages: "If languages are our how-to guides for living on planet Earth, we are handing our descendants an encyclopedia with almost all of the pages ripped out." The Long Now Foundation--currently breaking ground in Texas at the future site of its first monument-sized 10,000-year clock --is pursuing several programs in addition to the clock. One of these, the Rosetta Project, takes as its daunting mission the documentation of every human language currently in use; some 7,000 in total, the majority of which are in danger of disappearing without a trace. Directing this ambitious venture is Laura Welcher, a linguist who has specialized in building archival resources for indigenous North American languages.