A little more than a thousand years ago, monks at Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt’s Sinai desert removed Western Palestinian Aramaic and Greek writing from animal-skin parchments. They replaced the words with a Syriac translation of writings by John Climacus, also known as Saint John of the Ladder.
The monks had created something called a palimpsest—a text whose original writing was mostly erased to make room for new work—named the Codex Climaci Rescriptus. Parchments were extremely expensive at the time, so reusing pieces was common practice.
What if a hundred years from now, we come up with wonderful new uses for crude oil but we don't have enough crude oil anymore?