I don't know quite how to respond to the rest of this message, so I think I'll do it later, but as for the language part: I've been thinking about it over the past couple of weeks (I've never heard of the website you linked to, so I think I get to claim this as my own idea), and I think it would be a great idea to try to record as many languages as possible so future generations can learn them and figure out what all our newspapers and everything say. The best way to do this would probably be to describe them in one language that we can hope they'll still know --- I would recommend Latin, since it's fairly popular and it's stuck around this long and the Catholic Church, which I understand to still use it for official purposes, might well still be around then, and also because it is dead and it won't be going through the changes that living languages do (or, more specifically, it's already gone through those changes and become French, Spanish, Portuguese, and so on). We would have to provide complete grammars and dictionaries in Latin, and a good idea would be to include a copy of the International Phonetic Alphabet chart (see link) but with the labels and descriptions in Latin so they can understand how we pronounce things --- basically, we assume they have enough linguistic understanding to learn how to read Latin and then we teach them the rest and then they learn our languages. We would also, of course, include many examples of each language, including poetry, holy book translations, novels, movies (probably best to have these be film, and give them a movie projector and instructions on how to use it [if they can't, like they don't have lightbulbs or wall sockets, they can probably figure out how to construct something that works]), music, and so on. We might even try to put everything known to man into whatever it is we're leaving behind for these future generations, but somehow I doubt that will work. AT any rate, I think this is probably the best way to go for preserving languages for archaeologists of the future, and think it would be an interesting project to start.

Not that I speak Latin.

-Eric Sleator