Royal College of Art PhD student (and former amusement park employee) Julijonas Urbonas has 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.


Urbonas designed this deadly contraption to give the rider agency over their final voyage. Here's 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."


The Euthanasia Coaster only exists on paper, as I imagine Urbonas would have to cut through some impenetrable red tape before anyone could step right up. Kind of brings to mind the Carousel from Logan's Run, no?

[Royal College of Art via Deconcrete]