I think this is exactly Thiel's point though. We're spending lots of time, effort, and money on incrementally improving things like Engines and Personal Compute

I think this is exactly Thiel's point though. We're spending lots of time, effort, and money on incrementally improving things like Engines and Personal Computers and Social Media. Instead, we as a society would be better served focusing those resources on big-picture tasks like Nuclear Engineering, Bioengineering, or Material Sciences. Frankly, I disagree with him because I think we are making these incremental improvements because people want them, they are big enough to be noticeable, and they're easy thanks to all those other incremental improvements. Already we've reached a tipping point with things like mobile computing and social media where there are no big breakthroughs waiting around the corner. Once people accept that they'll start looking to the next sectors that can have big bang-for-your-buck improvements. Whether that's space flight, Nuclear Engineering, Bioengineering or what have you will depend on the incremental advances we are already making.