Peter Thiel Hesitant On If You Should Survive

Transhumanism and "visionaries" saying the quiet part out loud

After clearing out my phone this spring, the only social media I have left is X, which I admittedly use for some news.

That’s how I came across a video of Peter Thiel. one of the most influential voices in Silicon Valley. I don’t follow him closely, but I am always fascinated by the way we hang on tech billionaire’s every word when they start talking about their “vision” for humanity. So I listened.

In the clip, Thiel is asked a very basic question:
“You would prefer the human race to endure, right?”

And he hesitates.

Not because he misunderstood the question. But because he is genuinely unsure how to answer it.

Peter Thiel with NYT

I watched, in real time, this man who is widely considered a visionary, genius, architect of the future, hesitate on if he would prefer the human race to continue.

The interviewer presses him again. “This is a long hesitation. Should the human race survive?”

Thiel continues to stumble.

This interaction was absurd and difficult to watch, but it is what we should expect when progress becomes someone’s ultimate goal.

When there’s no Creator to answer to, and no purpose behind the design of the human person, then suffering looks like a defect, limitation looks like a failure, and humanity itself starts to look obsolete.

Eventually, Thiel answers, but with a qualification: “Yes, but I would like us to radically solve these problems.”

The “problems” Thiel wants to solve aren’t about war/poverty/injustice. The problems he hopes to solve are regarding mortality, physical limitation, and embodiment. In other words, the basic parameters that by definition make us human. We have bodies. We age. We die.

That’s not a problem in the system. That is the system. That is what it means to be human.

You don’t have to be a visionary or a genius to understand that.

But for Thiel, these aspects of our human nature aren’t realities to accept. Aging, weakness, death, aren’t part of what it means to be human. They’re simply design problems we haven’t figured out how to overcome yet.

His goal isn’t to help people suffer less or live better. His goal is to change what people are.

If you can’t say that a person has worth as they are then you’ve already decided that person only matters as much as they can be improved. You’ve decided that real humanity is something we haven’t reached yet. Something we have to get to.

Once you lose the ability to say this life is good, this body matters, this nature is worth protecting—you’re no longer working for human flourishing. You’re working for human replacement.

And once you believe that, it becomes very easy to justify leaving real people behind. People who are old, or weak, or dependent. People who still have limits that no longer fit in Thiel’s vision.

So the question isn’t whether Thiel’s view is interesting or forward-thinking. The question is:
Why are we calling someone a visionary who can’t even say human life is worth enduring?

And What kind of future are we building if we no longer believe humanity should survive?

Thiel’s Claims

1. Being human—mortal, limited, embodied—is a problem.

In Thiel’s framework, human nature is not something set in stone or sacred. It’s merely a starting point. Something to eventually move beyond. Just as we used tools to move past physical labor, Thiel believes we should use technology to move past biological weakness, and even death itself.

He sees transhumanism—like radical enhancement, mind-uploading, body modification—as the next phase of evolution. Not just medical progress, but the eventual replacement of the natural human being with something engineered to last longer, perform better, and suffer less.

And on the surface, that can sound compassionate: who wouldn’t want to prevent suffering or extend life?

But it rests on a deeper claim—that the way we are now is fundamentally insufficient. That to be fully human, we need to become something else.

But what he calls a flaw is actually what gives life its depth.

We love people precisely because we can lose them. Life is short, and that gives our relationships urgency. You forgive someone because they can fail. You protect someone because they can be hurt. You make sacrifices because there are things worth losing.

Limits don’t block virtue—they make it possible. You can’t have courage if there’s no danger. You can’t be generous if there’s no need. The moral life only exists because human beings are vulnerable.

Thiel doesn’t measure value that way. His standard is technological: longer life, more control, fewer problems. But that’s not how people work. A machine is valuable when it performs well. A person is valuable simply because of what they are—unique, embodied, irreplaceable.

Think about it. If you lived in a world where no one could die, no one could suffer, and everyone was self-sufficient—what would matter? Would you still love people, or just interact with them endlessly? Would anything be meaningful?

We need limitation to recognize value. We need neediness to recognize love.

That’s why the worth of a human being can’t be based on performance. It’s rooted in being—a rational, relational, embodied self. That’s the basis for every human right, every law protecting life, every ethical system that values persons.

The goal isn’t to outgrow being human. It’s to understand what being human actually means—and why it’s good.

You don’t get a more meaningful life by stripping away everything that gives life texture. You just flatten it into something empty and artificial.

A life without death, dependence, or pain isn’t a better life. It’s not life at all.

2. The future lies not in protecting humanity, but in replacing it with something “upgraded.”

Thiel makes it very clear that his objective is not to preserve the human race, but replace it with a superior version. But the moment you replace humanity, you no longer have humanity. You don’t get a better version of the species. You get a different species entirely.

The desire to upgrade only makes sense if human worth is defined by our output—how long we live, how much we know, how strong we are. But we are not okay with that logic anywhere else. Because that’s not how we treat people in any other way.

We don’t say a child with special needs is less valuable because she can’t do calculus. We don’t say a sick person matters less because they can’t work. If our performance actually defines our value, as Thiel’s framework suggests, then the youngest and oldest and most vulnerable and most of humanity become— disposable.

To ‘upgrade’ humans to something beyond human isn’t preservation, it’s elimination. The new thing isn’t us. It’s just using our name.

Here’s what I mean. If I melt down the Liberty Bell and reshape it into a car, I didn’t upgrade the bell. I destroyed it.

Once you decide that the human species is a temporary phase in the march toward something ‘better,’ every individual becomes optional. Because human dignity becomes conditional. And you can justify pretty much anything in the name of ‘progress.’

But we know from countless examples in history that the word for that is not ‘progress.’ It is eugenics.

3. Existing attempts to reshape the body (like gender transition) aren’t radical enough—and we should go further in transforming the self.

Let’s be clear on what’s being proposed here. Thiel is saying that current efforts to reshape the body—like gender transition—don’t go far enough. That if we really want to change the human experience, we need to reengineer the whole self: the body, the mind, even the brain’s relationship to consciousness.

But that vision rests on a very different understanding of the human person. Gender transition, regardless of your position on it, is still rooted in the idea that the person matters. It’s about aligning the body with the inner sense of identity. It assumes there’s a real self trying to be made whole.

Thiel’s approach doesn’t work that way. He sees the body as a shell—something temporary, replaceable. He’s not trying to help the person find coherence. He’s trying to discard the person’s limits altogether. That includes not just sex or biology, but death, memory, embodiment—everything that makes us relational and rooted in the world.

And when you take that seriously, you run into a problem: if everything can be modified—your body, your brain, your memories, your lifespan—then what exactly is left of you?

If identity is fluid and embodiment optional, then “you” become untraceable. There’s no continuity of self. You don’t have transformation—you have erasure. The self you’re trying to upgrade disappears in the process.

Real transformation assumes there’s a subject who persists through change. If every part of that subject is optional or replaceable, then there’s no continuity. You’re not being transformed. You’re being replaced.

But meaning doesn’t come from erasing your limits. It comes from facing them—honestly, with others, through love, suffering, responsibility, and moral growth. That’s the only kind of transformation that actually changes a person rather than discarding them.

Which leads us to Thiel’s final claim.

4. This is somehow Christianity.

Peter Thiel talks about resurrection, perfection, and overcoming death as if these Christian ideas can be achieved through science and technology. But that only works if you reduce Christianity to metaphors and ignore what it actually teaches.

In Christian theology, redemption isn’t about escaping the human condition. It’s about healing it. Sin wounds the will; grace restores it. And resurrection doesn’t mean becoming something else—it means being raised, body and soul, as the person you are, made whole by God.

Transhumanism, on the other hand, treats the body as a problem to solve. It sees death as an error, and identity as something you can rewrite. That’s not Christian anthropology. That’s a entirelu different worldview.

So when Thiel claims transhumanism continues the Christian story, he leaves out how transformation happens. In Christianity, it comes through repentance, freedom, and love—through suffering, not evasion of suffering.

More importantly, Thiel’s transhumanism takes Christian language—resurrection, transformation, immortality—and assigns it to human effort. In his view, we are the ones who will defeat death, remake the body, and perfect ourselves. The human race, with enough intelligence and willpower, will complete its own redemption.

But that’s not Christianity. Not even close. It’s self-salvation (palagianism-adjacent) and the Christian faith doesn’t just reject that idea—it defines itself against it.

From the beginning, Christianity teaches that transformation is something God does, not something we engineer. You can’t redeem yourself. You can’t raise yourself from the dead. You can’t heal your own soul. Every part of Christian soteriology—every doctrine of grace, salvation, and resurrection—rests on this truth: God acts first.

That’s why Christ had to die. That’s why grace is necessary. That’s why the resurrection of the body isn’t a metaphor—it’s a miracle. Christianity doesn’t say, “You have the tools to perfect yourself.” It says, “You are loved by a God who enters death for you and calls you back to life.”

Thiel’s version eliminates all of that. There’s no God. No grace. No sin. No repentance. Just code, hardware, and the illusion of control. That’s not a development of Christian hope. It’s a denial of it.

And if you need to remove the central claim of Christianity—that God saves—to make your vision work, then you’re not building on Christian ideas. You’re replacing them.

Final Thoughts

The Catholic faith teaches that we are made in the image of God—not in spite of our limits, but with them. Our bodies are not problems to solve; they are gifts. Death is not a bug in the system; it’s a doorway Christ Himself walked through. And transformation doesn’t come from engineering—it comes from grace.

If we forget that, we risk handing over the future to people who can’t even say whether we deserve to have one.