Looking for the thrill of a life time? Take a ride on the euthanasia roller coaster, designed by Julijonas Urbonas, a Ph.D. candidate in London’s Royal College of Art’s Design Interactions department from Lithuania. He has combined the fun of a roller coaster with the certainty of death.
The coaster—about a three minute ride—spends two minutes taking the soon-deceased to a height of 1,600 feet (there is an opt-out button before reaching the apex should the individual chicken out). The last minute is a colossal fall rushing through seven increasingly tighter loops and reaching a speed of 200-plus mph. The accumulating g-forces peak at 10gs, but that will likely pass unnoticed because the rider will be dead upon reaching the third one. This says Urbonas, “is a hypothetic euthanasia machine . . . engineered to humanely—with elegance and euphoria—take the life of a human being.” He foresees this becoming a possible attraction in places where voluntary euthanasia is legal—Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the U.S. states of Oregon and Washington—all without the accompanying paperwork dealing with medical issues and the like frequently delaying someone’s death wish.
This probably isn’t suited for quadriplegics or amputees, we’re told. Since their bodies lack substantial volume in the lower extremities to pool the blood their brains might not suffer the indispensable life-killing lack of oxygen that 10gs would ordinarily generate. That, just a passing note, would seem to undermine equal accessibility laws but I’m not an expert in that area and I don’t like roller coasters anyway.
September 20th, 2011 | 11:43 am
“You fled the surface, Sun-boy, because the people were stupid clods, happy and dull in their miserable happiness. You fled because you could not stand being a chicken in a poultry house, antiseptically bred, safely housed, and frozen when dead. You joined the other miserable, bright, restless people who sought freedom in the Gebiet. You learned about their drugs and their liquors and their smokes. You knew their women, and their parties, and their games. It wasn’t enough. You became a gentleman-suicide, a hero seeking a fun-death which would stamp you with your individuality. You came on down to the Bezirk, the most forgotten and loathsome place of all. You found nothing. Just the old machines and the empty corridors. Here and there a few mummies or bones. Just the silent lights and the faint murmur of air through the corridors.
…You came to this room. The weird door made it look like a good place for a fun-death, such as you poor castaways liked to seek, except that there was not much sport in dying unless other people know that you did it intentionally, and know how you did it. “
Cordwainer Smith, “Under Old Earth”
I hope the artist is playing a massive joke on us. If he speaks of such with a proud, earnest face and deeply committed to what he views as a humane mission, well…
September 20th, 2011 | 4:16 pm
As Dave said, surely this must be a joke, “performance art” designed to say something about the depravity of modern culture. I think he gives away the game here:
“There is no special ritual, nor is death given special meaning except that of the legal procedures and psychological preparation. It is like death is divorced from our cultural life…” Urbonas writes. “…But if it is already legal, why not to make it more meaningful?”
September 20th, 2011 | 5:52 pm
This really is just like something out of an absurdist science fiction story.
Strangely, in an era when opinion is ending the death penalty for convicted murderers in many countries, and in some states in the US, we are making it easier to kill the innocent, often in the very same jurisdictions.
September 21st, 2011 | 2:13 am
The guy’s a design artist, not a physiologist. I wouldn’t conclude that it’s a joke; not, at least, an intentional one. But from a physiological standpoint, if it’s not a joke it’s still fantasy.
The effect of sustained excess G forces is cerebral hypoxia. The brain can’t stand being hypoxic for very long, but one minute is very unlikely even to cause severe long-term neurologic dysfunction. The evidence is that brain cells take at least four minutes to start dying.
In this “ride,” death is much more likely to result from sudden deceleration at the end of the ride. The body doesn’t withstand negative Gs nearly as well as it does acceleration. Even so, a few race car drivers have survived, with no permanent ill effect, deceleration forces calculated to be in excess of -200 Gs.
From my view, I’m delighted to see this thing talked up. I trust the common sense of most people to sense its absurdity, and they will naturally — and rightly — think that the inventor is absurd, too, as well as his attempt to enshrine suicide as something “elegant” and “humane.”
Raymond has it right.
September 21st, 2011 | 10:31 am
Well, if it doesn’t work, does the rider get his money back?
September 21st, 2011 | 11:41 am
Russell Saltzman might not like roller coasters, but lots of people do. They are fun! And what a suitable way to go, for those whose main goal in life is happiness. Or if not for them personally, then for the old and infirm who annoyingly stand in the way of their happiness.
September 22nd, 2011 | 8:14 am
This actually IS a science fiction short story that I read as a teenager. In the story, people got tickets to an amusement park in which a certain number of them would die as their particular seat belt failed. It was a population-control park. Does anybody else remember this one?
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