8 Weird Ways Humans Are Trying Prolong Their Lives

8. Drinking Gold

Back in the days of antiquity, before the world was filled with fancy things like genetic modification and pills, it was believed in certain parts of the world that gold could play a part in extending human life; not in today's rational sense that being rich gives you more opportunity to live a healthy life, but that ingesting it could make you live longer. The logic for this was that gold doesn't tarnish or decay, so absorbing it into the body would transfer those properties into the person who consumes it - of course. Chinese texts dating back to 300 BC have toyed with the idea of making gold drinkable, and in 60 BC the Chinese Emperor Suan employed an alchemist to concoct a potion out of the pricey metal. When the alchemist failed at this task, he was nearly executed by an emperor who believed that he'd missed his chance to live forever (he was right, he's dead now). Following that, for hundreds of years Chinese alchemists would counterfeit gold using poisonous elements like mercury and arsenic, and use these in their 'elixirs of life'. Of course, we know today that mercury and arsenic are quite the opposite of life-giving, but it's too late to say that to the Jiajing Emperor, who died after drinking one of these elixirs in 1567.