The Alchemists were right, just not ambitious enough.

If they’d’ve started with turning hydrogen in to gold they’d’ve had more success, and we’d be a space fairing species by now.

Step 1: yeet mercury into a mini sun.

If this actually works, I'm going to be convinced that some alchemist overheard an alien dude talking about this but misinterpreted it in line with contemporary knowledge.

It does work, but nobody really cares because of all the radiation involved.

Here's a paper, but given the date I have no idea if it was written by humans or by AI: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13461

Seems the radiation goes away in a decade or so, not a huge amount of time in the grand scheme of things.

And I guess irradiated gold or a weird gold isotope would be just fine for putting in electronics that is meant to go beyond low earth orbit.

It's not their fault, they didn't have lean startup and blitz scaling yet. </s>