Life around an M-class star

With the large number of colony worlds residing around M-class stars
(courtesy Nyrath the Amazing), I wanted to do some thinking about what
life would be like unter a bloated, blood-red sun. We did not evolve
under that spectrum, and my guess is our psychesand bodies are not
terribly well attuned to living in a well lit darkroom.

While there's alot of discussion that could be had about the actual
effects, I immediately want to posit a 'solution' inspired by the
Russian space mirror experiment (Zarya?) going on soon. A series of
satellites (or single large ones) in orbit over population centers on an
M-sun colony world would collect solar energy on huge filimentary
arrays. the energy would converted through any number of processes (from
as low-tech as incandescence to somehing more PSBish) to a 'whiter'
light to fill in the rest of the human-visible spectrum. The modulated
light would then be re-emitted down to the surface, illuminating areas
of a couple-10 km across. The additional light would not be overly
bright, but would add enough human-nornal light to make things easier
for the general population. 

They would be called something like Solar Converter Array Satellites or
Radiant Frequency Modulation Satellites :-).

Manufacture of these would be an essential and lucrative business in the
colonization era. I'm thinking of making it one of New Israel's major
exports.

Noam R. Izenberg		noam.izenberg@jhuapl.edu