A Lithuanian designer, Julijonas Urbonas, conceived the “Euthanasia Coaster,” a theoretical amusement park ride intended to end the lives of its passengers in what he described as a humane, elegant, and euphoric manner. Urbonas, who identifies himself on his website as an artist, designer, researcher, engineer, and the founder of the Lithuanian Space Agency, also holds a PhD in Design Interactions from the Royal College of Art in London, designed this concept in 2010.
The concept re-emerged in discussions after TikTok user Luke Davidson explained the ride’s mechanics in a video. “You can only ride this roller coaster once,” he said. “It’s capable of holding up to 24 passengers. Once they’re all on board, there’s a slow ascent to the top, which is 510 feet in the air. That’s just a little bit smaller than the tallest building in America. Once they’re at the top, it gives everyone the decision to stop and go back down safely. After that, everyone has to manually press a button to start the ride.”
Once initiated, the coaster plummet at speeds around 223 miles per hour, leading into a series of progressively tighter loops. Urbonas explains that this design leads to riders losing consciousness due to the extreme g-forces, which ultimately results in death from cerebral hypoxia, or lack of oxygen to the brain. “The biomonitoring suit [that passengers wear] double-checks if there is a need for the second round, which is extremely unlikely, as the result is guaranteed by seven-fold repetition,” Urbonas noted.
This isn’t Urbonas’s only dark conceptual design; he also envisioned “The Planet of People,” an artificial asteroid composed entirely of human bodies, to study human adaptation to space without gravity.