Euthanasia Coaster / Julijonas Urbonas

Euthanasia Coaster By Julijonas Urbonas - 01

Rating: 7.0/10 (1 vote cast)

“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 sad 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.”

Notes:

Cause of death: Cerebral hypoxia, lack of oxygen supply to the brain.
Additional effects: Greyout – loss of color vision; Tunnel vision – loss of peripheral vision; Blackout – complete loss of vision; G-LOC – g-force induced Loss Of Consciousness.

Project Data

Project name: Euthanasia Coaster
Location: n/a
Type: roller coaster
Dimensions: Height: 510 m, Drop lenght: 500 m, Track length: 7544 m
Duration: Lift: 120 s, Drop: 10 s, Exposure to 10 g: 60 s, Total: 3:20
Features: Max speed: 100m/s, Inversions: 7, Max g-force: 10 g

The people

Designer: Julijonas Urbonas
Engineering: Julijonas Urbonas
Health issues: Dr. Michael Gresty, Spatial Disorientation Lab, Imperial College, London
Model: Euthanasia Coaster
Application: Euthanasia, execution
Model making: Paulius Vitkauskas
Text Description: © Courtesy of Julijonas Urbonas
Images: © Aistė Valiūtė and Daumantas Plechavičius