Well, he's not doing it by himself, but Bob Geldof and his production company Ten Alps are to work with the BBC on a new project which plans to create a digital dictionary cataloguing the 900 different groups of people that anthropologists believe form the human race. It's the accompaniment to an eight part television series in which crews will travel the world filming the different people, in an attempt to create a definitive record of mankind, before cultures which are becoming homogenised due to globalisation die out.
Producer John McGuire says: "This will be an A-to-Z of mankind which will catalogue the world we live in now, the people who share this planet, the way we live and the way we adapt to face common and different challenges". Geldof added: "Ultimately, I suppose in some ways we're also building the world's family photo album".
On the cost of the project, Geldof continued in a typically profane manner, telling reporters: "The budget's going to be fucking huge, but getting money is a piece of piss compared to building it and making it - that is going to be the real challenge. We'll have grants coming out of our arses for a project like this".
Geldof went on to share what had motivated him to start the project, explaining that his inspiration came from a trip to Northern Niger twenty years back. "I was there with the regional governor looking out at something that looked like the surface of the moon with the regional governor who told how 300 different languages that had once existed in the region and had disappeared forever in just two years during the famine", he said. "Even though I had never heard those voices or those languages I felt a sense of loss, I already missed them".