…to the purpose of human history:

A small component on Salo’s spacecraft breaks, stalling him in the Solar System. He requests help from Tralfamadore, and his fellow Tralfamadorians respond by manipulating human history so that primitive humans evolve and create a civilization in order to produce the replacement part. Stonehenge, the Great Wall of China and the Kremlin are all messages in the Tralfamadorian geometrical language, informing Salo of their progress.

As it turns out, the replacement part is a small metal strip, rounded on one corner, with two holes punched in it. Salo’s message, for whose sake the whole of human history was manipulated, is a single dot, which in Tralfamadorian means “greetings”.

to us all, from Bureau 42