A fictional story about alien lizards trying to build a faster-than-light communication device using moral philosophy, only to discover that moral progress is precisely slow enough to prevent this from working.
Longer summary
This post is a fictional story about lizard people from Alpha Draconis 1 attempting to build an ansible, a device for faster-than-light communication. They design an elaborate system using beetles, mice, and moral philosophy, specifically negative average preference utilitarianism. The story explores concepts in ethics, physics, and the nature of moral progress. It concludes with the ansible's failure, revealing that the arc of moral progress is exactly long enough to prevent faster-than-light transmission of moral information, thus preserving fundamental physical limits.
Shorter summary