As someone who still plays Roller Coaster Tycoon, I must say this is the most bizarre idea involving roller coasters I’ve ever heard/thought of. And I’ve designed my fair share of extreme coasters.
Julijonas Urbonas, PhD student at London’s Royal College of Art, has come up with this concept that he calls Euthanasia Coaster. Why that name, you ask? Because after riding on it you don’t go back home, you go to the morgue.
“Euthanasia Coaster” is a hypothetical 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 aeronautics/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, 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.”
One of his other inventions is the domestic earthquake generator, which is “a doorbell designed to transform a slightest tap on a door into a domestic earthquake.” Not as cool as the killer coaster and not recommended if you’re living in Japan, but at least you can “enjoy” it more than once.
That being said, if they ever build this coaster I’m definitely going on it once I’m old and useless. Seems like one of the better ways out of this world.
