A few days ago Phil asked for suggestions on how to get more daylight. Forget daylight-savings-time trickery, how do we get an actual increase in hours of daylight?
Light up Jupiter?
Jupiter is probably too small to ignite like a star – it doesn’t have the mass. In his book 2010, Clarke had his mysterious aliens increase the mass of Jupiter in some fashion to allow it to ignite. Perhaps by seeding the planet with neutron matter. This is just a little out of the realm of possibility for now. Which is a good thing. Converting our solar system into a binary system strikes me as just a bit dangerous for our planet.
Back to the drawing board!
What if you placed a giant mirror in an orbit that was stationary relative to the day-night terminator? Instead of geosynchronous orbit, it would be a terminatorsynchronous orbit. You could reflect light from the dayside to whatever points on the nightside that you want.
You could choose different cities to keep lit at night by continually adjusting the angle of the mirror. And wouldn’t this be great in an emergency? If a community is hit by disaster you could keep the daylight on during the rescue.
Because the mirror would have to be so large, this project wouldn’t really be feasible until we get a space elevator.