Suicide Roller Coaster: Engineer Creates Ride to Kill 'Humanely'
A Lithuanian engineer has developed a roller coaster concept that allows riders to experience a final thrill before it kills them. Although the concept seemed impractical when introduced nearly a year ago, the introduction of mobile Euthanasia clinics has brought the death coaster back to mind.
Julijonas Urbonas, a PhD candidate in London's Royal College of Art's Design Interactions department, has described himself as an architect and engineer. His proposed coaster has a massive drop, which would propel riders to the speed of 223 miles per hour and then send them through a series of progressively shrinking loops.
Riders would eventually lose consciousness and die due to a lack of oxygen flowing to the brain. Urbonas has named the concept the "Euthanasia Coaster."
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"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," Urbonas told Mail Online. Urbonas, who has described his work as 'artistic and philosophical,' has not been received well by some who are opposed to euthanasia.
"Whilst appreciating the artist's sense of humour and light-heartedness, we also need to remember that the life a human being cannot ever be taken 'humanely with elegance and euphoria' and with this method the last sensation would more probably be one of overwhelming vertigo and fright," Dr. Peter Saunders from Care Not Killing told Mail Online.
The concept however, is not a new one to Urbonas, who was interviewed by Discovery nearly a year ago. Urbonas told Discovery that the "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."
"Urbonas sees it as both an intellectual and artful departure from the world, one that isn't about the paperwork and medical issues of the current euthanasia system," Discovery reported. Although the concept seemed like an improbable invention a year ago, access to euthanasia has become more and more prevalent.
A new program was launched in the Netherlands last week, which involves mobile clinics making home visits free of charge to patients who are seeking euthanasia and have been denied by their doctors.
The program has been referred to by critics, who believe that life is a gift from God, as "death on wheels."
Euthanasia has been legal in the Netherlands since 2002. Euthanasia is also legal in Belgium and Luxembourg, and in the United States in Oregon and Washington.
