Summer on Jupiter.

I liked this episode, but either I missed something or Issac made a mistake.

He seemed to imply that something like orbital rings ("active support") could compress the planet Jupiter, to increase its fusion rate. However the only inward force orbital rings exert is their weight. In other words, the only way to compress Jupiter with a shell would be if the shell were very massive, more massive than whatever mass is already holding Jupiter's atmosphere down. In the end you might even need to add the mass of a conventional star to make it work.

Maybe an alternative is to dump small black holes into the gas giant? Hydrogen will compress to event-horizon densities around each black hole and fuse, emitting lots of energy such as comes from an accretion disk.

The only challenge would be to keep the black holes from merging into one big singularity in the center. Which makes me wonder, would a black hole have any air drag in Jupiter's atmosphere? Or would a swarm of black holes just orbit around the core, sucking up hydrogen and emitting light for centuries?

Suppose a primordial black hole massed at 10−8 kg passed through your head at 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% the speed of light.. Would it slow down? Would it kill you. How massive would it need to be to kill you? Where is Fraser when you need him?

Another better approach might be to start with this image of fusion candles from Isaac's video:

But instead of shooting matter into the sky, it is shooting light. If the machine is self-reproducing it can tile over the entire outside of Jupiter, and eventually make the planet a solid ball of light, serving the same role as a star.

More practically though you would turn most of those 'flashlights' off, and use the minimum needed to warm the moons you are living on.

Now it is almost starting to make sense. This could also push lightsail craft around the solar system from angles the Sun could not reach, with more power than available from any other planet. Jupiter and the Sun would be the twin hubs of a whole energy/transportation economy.