Julijonas Urbonas, a Royal College of Art PhD student (and former amusement park employee) recently drafted designs for a project he calls "The Euthanasia Coaster," a fast and fatal thrill ride designed to starve the rider's brain of oxygen and bring them swiftly to their death.
Urbonas designed this rollercoaster to give the rider complete agency over their final few moments of existence. The following is his description of the project:
"Euthanasia Coaster" is a hypothetic euthanasia machine in the form of a roller coaster, engineered to humanely – with elegance and euphoria – take the life of a human being. Riding the coaster's track, the rider is subjected to a series of intensive motion elements that induce various unique experiences: from euphoria to thrill, and from tunnel vision to loss of consciousness, and, eventually, death. Thanks to the marriage of the advanced cross-disciplinary research in space medicine, mechanical engineering, material technologies and, of course, gravity, the fatal journey is made pleasing, elegant and meaningful.
Celebrating the limits of the human body but also the liberation from the horizontal life, this ‘kinetic sculpture' is in fact the ultimate roller coaster: John Allen, former president of the famed Philadelphia Toboggan Company, once [said] that "the ultimate roller coaster is built when you send out twenty-four people and they all come back dead. This could be done, you know."
Obviously this only exists on paper as the world is still not ready to make euthanasia something that can be fun (if even acknowledge it at all). So for the time being we will just have to stick to the infinitely boring choice to turn off the life-support machine.
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