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Designer Creates "Euthanasia Roller Coaster"
disco_tracy writes "Lithuanian amusement park worker and current PhD candidate in London's Royal College of Art's Design Interactions department, Julijonas Urbonas, has made a design for a hypothetical coaster that could be the future of humane euthanasia. Urbonas says that it is engineered to give a person a way to die with 'with elegance and euphoria.' From the article: 'The three-minute ride involves a long, slow, climb -- nearly a third of a mile long -- that lifts one up to a height of more than 1,600 feet, followed by a massive fall and seven strategically sized and placed loops. The final descent and series of loops take all of one minute. But the gravitational force -- 10 Gs -- from the spinning loops at 223 miles per hour in that single minute is lethal.'"
... and there isn't a thing elegant about it.
Too dangerous.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I have a design for a "ride" that involves a long, slow climb up a large staircase, followed by a massive fall and one strategically placed sidewalk. I think it's the future of euthanasia!
If you're in a wheelchair, do they let you jump to the front of the line?
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Who is going to clean up all the excrement when death-induced sphincter relaxation occurs in conjunction with high G's? Eww, I don't want to ride on that - regular coasters are bad enough.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Obviously this is just a [stupid] publicity stunt, but most of the people that I know that would (would have) opted for euthanasia were elderly. They wouldn't be the type to board a roller coaster.
They do need an option that is better than putting a gun to the head.
So if a Carnie screws up, do people survive?
crazy dynamite monkey
Reminds me of Soylent Green. A pleasant experience followed by death, then your body is liquified and turned into green crackers.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
The real problem would be the moderately sub-lethal cases:
According to TFA, the plan is that inertia prevents blood circulation to the brain, starving it of oxygen and inducing death. Unfortunately, there are a lot of increasingly impaired outcomes short of death that depriving the brain of oxygen can give you. Suicide certainly isn't for everyone; but I don't know of anyone who is looking for some serious permanent brain damage...
I want to die in my sleep, like my grandfather. Not screaming in terror like the people in the back seat of his car.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
10g is not enough to crush you. It's enough to cause the blood to pool in your extremities, depriving your brain of oxygen, but wouldn't otherwise harm your body with any long-term effects.
Learn to love Alaska
No, Mr. Bond... I expect you to ride.
Gravity is a contributing factor in nearly 73 percent of all accidents involving falling objects. -Dave Barry
Yes, and they do it in an incredibly uncomfortable way. I'd be willing to bet that the person who suggested this has never pulled more than about 2Gs. When the acceleration is enough that it's hard to pump blood up into your head, you experience nausea and lots of small pains. This generally starts mildly at around 4Gs and becomes progressively worse as the force increases.
Basically, this idea sounds like someone saying 'well, the blood draining out of your brain is quite a relaxing way to die, we should chop people's balls off for euthanasia so that their blood will drain out quickly and they'll have a quick and peaceful death.'
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Helium would be the best choice. All the effectiveness of nitrogen, but with the added benefit of the person's last moments being hilarious to any onlookers.
The guests arrive in the entrance hall here, are carried along the corridor on a conveyor belt in extreme comfort and past murals depicting Mediterranean scenes, towards the rotating knives. The last twenty feet of the corridor are heavily soundproofed. The blood pours down these chutes and the mangled flesh slurps into these large containers. None of your blood caked on the walls and flesh flying out of the windows inconveniencing passers-by with this one.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
This is very similar to to what some rebreather divers have done by accident. Turn off the oxygen supply (or forget to turn it on) while keeping the CO2 scrubber working. The N2 levels build, the O2 levels drop, no CO2 to cause respiratory distress and a gentle fade off into death.
For the more adventurous among you, you can test mild varieties of this yourself by swinging your arm, extended, making circles with your hand.
Do this at a normal pace, compare that hand to the other, it'll be a fair bit more red.
Do this faster, and you'll start to feel some of that 'small pains' - it's not entirely unlike when your hand's 'asleep', but more painful.
Go faster still and you'll have successfully flung blood cells up toward your skin, which is now mottled with little red pinpricks. Don't worry, it should disappear in a day or two. ( But if it doesn't, don't blame me.. blame yourself for actually trying this, you nutter. )
Now imagine that scaled up just that tiny bit more and involving not just your fingertips but pretty much your entire body including internal organs.
Doesn't sound particularly comfortable to me.
Pretty sure I also read about this story several months back, somewhere.. oh well.
This was my thought as well. Some acceleration can be fun, but it is very uncomfortable beyond a certain point, and enough to kill you would be extremely painful. You want death to be either non-violent or extremely quick, if possible. This is neither. And several minutes of anticipation? Fuck no. I'll take a morphine OD (which seems painless from what I know of it), if it comes to that.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
"John Stapp was subjected to 15 g for 0.6 second and a peak of 22 g during a 19 March 1954 rocket sled test. He would eventually survive a peak of more than 46 g, with more than 25 g for 1.1 sec.[6]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-force#Human_tolerance_of_g-force
While Mr. Stapp's tests were short, the coaster doesn't appear to sustain the high level of g's necessary either.
The red bull air race has a limit of 12g - indicating that pilots can survive even that much.
I have witnessed pilots exceed 12g and be disqualified because of it - and the same pilot complained that the 12g limit was stupid. The limit is there to stop pilots from pushing it too far, in a bid to curb "lap" times.
However, how many super-fit and healthy people would be interested in euthanasia? not many I'd guess.
This seemed like a reasonable sig at the time.
on the other hand, what if you did actually start to enjoy the beginning of the rollercoaster...and because you were experiencing enjoyment - wanted to change your mind?
That would suck.
This seemed like a reasonable sig at the time.
If they had no limits, whoever pulls the most Gs wins. It would be a contest where the loser blacks out and dies, and Red Bull doesn't want to support death sports, so we get a reasonable limit (though higher than I'd consider safe, but that's their call, not mine).
Learn to love Alaska
Didn't the recent episode "The Tip Of The Zoidberg" conclude with a roller coaster designed to help the Professor suicide?
And what about "Mr. Bonecrusher" in the Chevy Chase movie "Nothing But Trouble"?
You can survive 10g momentarily, what kills you is that it's 10g for an -entire minute- which above poster points out is long enough for your brain to die from oxygen deprivation.
Have you ever tried riding a big roller coaster? I guess not.
Swinging your arm around quickly may indeed be slightly painful. But that is a much higher G-force, well above that which would make you lose consciousness. If your arm is 1 meter long, and you are spinning it around at two revolutions per second (I'm sure you can do more than that), the tips will already be experiencing 15g.
The only ill effects I've had from high G-forces is tiredness and a slight headache afterwards, never during the event. I don't think that's an issue in this case, except maybe St.-Peter may have to stock up on asprin tablets.