She's right, Thiel & Co. are entirely wrong. And not just subtly, but extremely wrong.

Here are some problems I have with Peter Thiel and other people that claim we're not making progress or pulling off 'moon shots':

The Large Hadron Collider

The International Space Station

Tesla and the advances coming to the auto market

The human genome

Mapping the human brain

Understanding stem cells, and the incredibly fast rate at which we're learning to grow new organs. Organ growing will be vastly more important than the Manhattan Project or the Hoover Dam, it's not even going to be a close comparison. In fact, it's a sick joke that anybody would be so confused as to think there's a comparison to be made.

Virtual reality, which is going to be an extraordinary accomplishment and lead to entirely new visualized space that will be so large, it's nearly impossible to comprehend for people today; it'll enable exploration and experiences for the visual and auditory on a scale that would be otherwise impossible for a person in the real physical space. It has begun, and will accelerate very quickly from here. Thiel & Co. either pretend this isn't coming, or are ignorant of just how immense it's going to be. VR is as much an accomplishment of the physical space, as it is the digital - the infrastructure that had/has to be put in place to make it possible at the scale it's about to be, tallies in the trillions of dollars cost wise. People are sitting around wondering what we're going to use all of our storage capabilities for - in less than 30 years VR space will consume more storage than the entire Internet combined today.

Digital currencies will generate (are generating) a once-per-century rebuild of the global economy when it comes to how we use / regard / store / secure money and wealth. This is a big deal, even if it's going to take decades to be fully realized. This breakthrough is only made possible by breakthroughs in the atomic space, nano scale manufacturing that is extraordinary all by itself.

Robotics, and the extremely fast pace at which it's gathering steam. This alone proves the progress worriers entirely wrong, it's going to be that big of a deal over the next two decades. The breakthroughs in this field have been astounding, even if they always seem incremental; measured in 10 year spans, it's remarkable frankly.

Solar power has gone from being so weak as to be a joke even just 20 years ago, to being powerful and cheap enough to be practical for many purposes. And it's only going to get cheaper and more powerful by the year forward. Efficiently harnessing the sun for energy, then building a huge global industry around it and deploying it, is an extraordinary accomplishment, every bit on par with The Manhattan Project; I'd argue it's a greater accomplishment in fact.

The smart phone is more important than the Hoover Dam. The technology, the people, the science, and the industry that it required as a whole is a moon shot. Extreme improvements in communication and knowledge acquisition - what the smart phone represents - are at least as important as energy or going to the moon; I'd argue more important.

People arguing about the low value of Twitter / WhatsApp / Instagram / Facebook, may have a problem in social thinking or social understanding. I think they make the mistake of failing to understand just how important communication and expression is for human beings, and it likely derives from an engineering brain bias.