The wish to turn night into day is not exclusive to casino operators and hedgehogs. Scientists in China recently announced a plan to replace Chengdu’s street lights with an artificial moon—or illumination satellite—by sometime next year. The fake moon would reflect sunlight from across the solar system, providing a glow roughly eight times brighter than that provided by the real moon.

If Chengdu—more than fifteen times larger in area than New York City—can do it, could New York? Could the City That Never Sleeps upgrade itself to the City That Knocked Sleep Upside the Head? A call was placed to Roald Sagdeev, a physicist. “In principle, there would be no technical difficulty to create such a moon in New York City,” he said. “But it would be quite expensive.” The moon would likely be made of an aluminum- or silver-coated plastic, and would orbit about three hundred miles above Earth, or 238,500 miles closer than the real moon. Louis D. Friedman headed a NASA study on solar sails in the nineteen-seventies. “The moon,” he surmised, “would be manufactured with ripstops in it, like you have with camping gear, so if you got a tear from a micro-meteorite the tear wouldn’t propagate.”

How big a piece of shiny plastic are we talking about? “When we did the Halley’s Comet rendezvous mission, in the late seventies”—a failed plan to have a spacecraft monitor the celestial visitor—“the design was something like fifteen kilometres in diameter,” Friedman said. “I imagine that would just cover Brooklyn.” No question: a moon for New York would need to be yuge. And it would need yuge support from residents. (New Yorkers spend about half a billion dollars a year on blackout shades.)

“I worry that night is something that people look forward to,” Richard Florida, an urban-studies theorist at the University of Toronto, said. “People are already concerned about light pollution.” Deborah Berke, the dean of the Yale School of Architecture, said, “My fear is that a New York version would be like the subway—creaky, old, and late.” Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore cop who teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said, “It strikes me as a luminary nightmare. The idea that more lighting is better for fighting crime is wrong. Better lighting is better. If we could put out pleasant candlelight and have people sitting outside at tables, that’s how you make the city safe, in the Jane Jacobs sense of getting people out on the street.”

Before a New York moon could be seriously considered, difficult conversations would need to be had about its draw as a tourist attraction, its effect on wildlife, and the increased stress it would put on parents getting their children to fall asleep in a newly Scandinavianized lightscape. “If this moon were more of a decorative or holiday thing, there’s likely to be more support,” Florida said. Berke proposed a bipurpose, daylight-saving orientation: “Between Thanksgiving and Valentine’s Day, it would be up in the sky from four-thirty to seven-thirty, when it gets dark and depressing. Then, in the summer, you would fold it up, flip it over, and drop it down onto the side of the East River and it could be a beach.”

It probably doesn’t help that a similar fake-moon plan devised by Russia fizzled. In 1999, engineers tried to use an orbital mirror launched from the Mir space station to warm the country’s dark northern regions with reflected sunlight. The project was abandoned when the mirror, an eighty-three-foot-wide sheet of Mylar, failed to unfurl and was incinerated in space, like a prom decoration caught in an intergalactic bug zapper.

Five years ago, Martin Andersen, an artist in Rjukan, Norway, successfully lobbied his town, situated in a deep valley, to install three jumbo mirrors on a mountaintop in order to bring a regular blast of sunlight to Rjukan’s dim main square. Andersen is enthusiastic about the New York moon concept. At the very least, he said, “it would make for some nice crime-scene photos.” ♦