Whatever may prove to be the weaknesses of Teilhard de Chardin's work, he will always have the credit of having correctly defined the major change of our age. In The Phenomenon of Man he observes:

It has been stated over and over again. Through the discovery yesterday of the railway, the motor car and the airplane, the physical influence of each man, formerly restricted to a few miles, now extends to hundreds of leagues or more. Better still, thanks to the prodigious biological event represented by the discovery of electro-magnetic waves, each individual finds himself henceforth (actively and passively) simultaneously present, over land and sea, in every comer of the earth.