What if the greatest threat to our stories isn’t forgetting, but losing the ability to read them? In this fascinating conversation, Helen speaks with Andrew Warner, Special Projects Director at the Long Now Foundation, an organisation dedicated to fostering long-term thinking over the next 10,000 years. They explore the Rosetta Project, endangered languages, the Digital Dark Age, the 10,000-Year Clock, and why preserving language may be one of humanity’s most important acts of stewardship.

Along the way you’ll hear about the Rosetta Disc currently resting on a comet, another archive on the Moon, endangered languages, the Antikythera Mechanism, Voyager’s Golden Record, and the remarkable human desire to leave something meaningful behind.

This is a conversation about legacy, stewardship and the stories that connect past, present and future.

✓ Why future generations may struggle to read our digital records

✓ How the Rosetta Stone inspired a modern attempt to preserve the world’s languages

✓ Why linguists estimate that most of today’s languages may disappear within the next century

✓ How language carries ecological, medicinal and cultural knowledge

✓ Why stories are some of the longest-lasting technologies humanity has ever created

✓ What the Long Now Foundation means by “long-term thinking”

✓ How ordinary people can help preserve cultural memory in their own communities

Long Now Foundation

Rosetta Project

Clock of the Long Now

Long Now Talks Archive

Internet Archive

PanLex Language Project

If this conversation sparked your curiosity about language, story, legacy or humanity’s future:

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Because the stories we preserve today may be the stories that help someone understand who we were tomorrow.