He pondered much as he paused a while before reaching the threshold of bronze, for the splendour of the palace was like that of the sun or moon. The walls on either side were of bronze from end to end, and the cornice was of blue enamel. The doors were gold, and hung on pillars of silver that rose from a floor of bronze ..
~ The Odyssey - Book VII (Samuel Butler Translation. p218)
In Book 7 of The Odyssey, Ulysses visits the palace of Alcinous, and he is awestruck by the grandeur and opulence. The walls and floor were made of bronze, the doors were made of gold, the pillars were silver, and so forth. Though this is fiction, it made me think of the grand buildings of the past. Whenever I read about grand halls, luxurious decor, large gardens, and gigantic tombs (Pyramids), I’m always reminded that these were possible mainly because of slavery. Maybe the image was shaped by the movie The Ten Commandments that I saw in my childhood, where the slaves were forced to work on building giant structures.
In the 21st century, humans are able to build much grander structures without putting other humans through harrowing conditions that existed in the past. There are machines to do most of the hard labor. When we get intelligent robots, I wonder how things will be. The scale of grandeur could really be much higher. We could probably build grand homes for everyone on Earth. We could also probably build floating cities that orbit the Earth. Human imagination has always been grand, but there was the limitation of what the body could do. But the hope is that we could transcend the limitations with intelligent robots and AI in general.