The thought of future archaeologists being thoroughly confused by Roman terracotta tiles that apparently generates electricity amuses me.
It seems unlikely that the pyramids were power plants and obelisks energy receivers [1], but maybe power plants of the future will look like the pyramids and energy receivers like obelisks.
The pyramids seem to have been built in the 26th century BCE rather than 100th, but an advanced ur-civilization may have developed the means and will that "they actually got out with whisk brooms, scoop shovels and little spoons and cleared out every single trace of their daily lives, their utensils, their pottery, their wood, their tools and so on" [2].
1. https://medium.com/understanding-reality/were-the-pyramids-p...
2. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/pyramid/explore/howold2.html
Unless people in the future become religious nuts even worse than today's, I don't see why they'd waste so much space and resources on power-generating burial mounds. The pyramids may be impressive for a primitive civilization to build, but they were functionally completely useless and just a collosal waste of manpower, materials, and space.
This is quite unlike solar-power-collecting terra cotta roof tiles: roofs serve a real purpose, on buildings that people live and work in.
That's how you show affluence. With all the resources we have, we don't have enough to waste them. From that point of view, that civilization was much more than primitive. Also: [1].
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_precession#Ancient_Egypt...
And yet we admire them and keep them around for 100s or 1000s of years, because of their greatness. The same for the pyramids. Of course, the effort served a function as well: to establish and maintain a power structure, to give people whose lives hung on strings far more often than ours do a sense of safety and hope.
Man needs greatness. A glimpse of the divine. Our civilization has lost this, and the hyperfunctionalism has taken over our cities. We have removed even ornament and other signs of beauty from our buildings. And it has made them worse.
But these trends come in waves. 50 years from now and we might again spend extra money on whatever will be the equivalent of neogothic or classicist buildings.
And I‘m looking forward to it.
We still build great things, but today they're functional: skyscrapers, for instance. They're not really the most efficient type of building, but they are functional. And modern buildings are not devoid of ornamentation or signs of beauty, we just don't find gargoyles to be fashionable any more.
Edit: I see your point now, that medieval churches had other functions besides the religious stuff. Still, I see those things as only secondary functions to the buildings; museums and concert halls have those things as their primary functions and are optimized for them. I've been in medieval churches, and there's very little artwork in them, relative to their size, compared to any decent art museum. But I agree, they were a lot more functional for the people of the time than the pyramids.
[1] In fact the burial aspect might even have been a secondary one.
Even if medieval churches had no purpose other than to construct an impressive structure, that isn't something we ought to deem unworthy. Greatness is a fine goal in its own right.
After all, art museums and concert halls overwhelmingly display the things that people find impressive. The things that people don't find impressive don't stand the test of time.
Utilitarian function is certainly a great virtue, but it is not the only virtue.
From that perspective they are not particularly less practical than modern museums or most other public buildings.
The Egyptian pyramids lacked all of this.
Offtopic, but I love that I read this as "we keep them around for one hundreds to one thousands of years".
Modern people hide their energy givers and their dependency on them (gosh forbid your tv has power cords showing)
Except those decorative halogen lights that hang from the + and - wires. As a kid I was messing with a pendant light over my kitchen island and accidentally bridged those wires together!
Don't get me wrong, I think it is great to have more choice in what solar panels look like and I think preserving the appearance of historical architecture is important. But I don't think that one is fundamentally more astetically pleasing than the other. It also makes the idea "integrated to the point of invisibility" an interesting concept. What is invisible? Most of our current building are founded in practically with astestic choices a minor customization on top.
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1. I did some nice integration of TeX and friends into the VMS CLI setup so that, e.g., one could access iniTeX by doing TEX/INIT or set a number of parameters via command line prompts.
2. I completed ports of some of the fringe TeX-related apps like MFT and also wrote a DVI previewer which could display a preview of TeX output for people connected to their VM/CMS system via the Kermit terminal software which supported Tektronics graphics. A developer in Germany contributed GDDM support for IBM’s graphics terminals.
That said, it does feel like the past few centuries (since the Industrial Revolution, but even moreso since the late 1800s/early 1900s) have seen incredible avancement in technology, unlike anything seen before. I mean electricity as we know it - the means to reliably generate and use it - have only been around for just over 200 years now.