6 facts about the Euthanasia Coaster, the roller coaster designed to kill (2024)

• The Euthanasia Coaster is an artistic concept created by a former ride designer for an amusem*nt park in Lithuania.
• The Euthanasia Coaster’s design is meant to kill its passengers by inducing cerebral hypoxia.
• It has seven Euler spirals that expose riders to high gravitational forces for longer than the human body can generally tolerate.

Euthanasia is the act of intentionally ending a living being’s life to relieve their suffering. While commonly performed by vets on severely sick or injured animals, euthanasia has historically entailed complex ethical, moral, and legal considerations when applied to people, and it remains a highly controversial and debated topic around the world.

Active voluntary euthanasia has become legal in at least eight countries since the 2000s. These include the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Canada, Colombia, Spain, New Zealand, and more recently, Portugal. Euthanasia is also legal in most states of Australia.

Other jurisdictions permit passive euthanasia, which refers to the withdrawal of life-sustaining or life-prolonging treatment with the patient’s (or their family’s) consent, allowing the person to die naturally.

In the U.S., “medical aid in dying” is legal in several states, including California, Colorado, Oregon, Vermont, New Mexico, Maine, New Jersey, Hawaii, Washington, and the District of Columbia.

Euthanasia is typically carried out via oral, intravenous, or intramuscular administration of certain drugs in lethal doses. However, some have proposed alternative methods. For example, in 2017, author and former physician Philip Nitschke created the 3D-printed suicide capsule, the Sarco, which, upon activation, fills itself with liquid nitrogen to cause hypoxia and death by inert gas asphyxiation.

Long before that, in 2010, the conceptual design of another euthanasia device, the Euthanasia Coaster, stirred controversy.

Here’s why.

1. This roller coaster is meant to kill its passengers via hypoxia

The Euthanasia Coaster is a roller coaster engineered specifically to kill its passengers in a peaceful, humane way — as long as they find roller coasters peaceful. Its design puts riders through a series of increasingly intense loops, leading to a lack of oxygen in the brain.

This is actually one of the reasons why some people pass out on traditional roller coasters. Roller coasters expose riders to different gravitational forces, often referred to as G-forces. Normally, we’re only exposed to the acceleration of Earth’s gravity. But when riding a roller coaster, we encounter varying G-forces that act in different directions as the coaster accelerates, decelerates, climbs, and descends.

These abrupt changes in acceleration can redistribute blood away from the brain. A reduction in blood flow to the brain can lead to a condition known as hypoxia, where the brain is deprived of oxygen. As a result of hypoxia, people on roller coasters can experience tunnel vision, dizziness, and blackouts.

Riders do not normally die from hypoxia on roller coasters because they are built with safety in mind. Ride designs are tested to ensure they don’t put people through high G-forces for over a few seconds.

The Euthanasia Coaster’s ride design does exactly the opposite, extending the time the riders are subject to high G-forces to intentionally produce cerebral hypoxia, loss of consciousness, and, eventually, death.

2. The creator used to work at an amusem*nt park

The Euthanasia Coaster was conceived by Julijonas Urbonas, an artist, designer, and researcher from Lithuania.Urbonas is also the founder of the Lithuanian Space Agency, which researches space architecture and “gravitational aesthetics.”

Unsurprisingly, he used to work as a ride designer at an amusem*nt park in Klaipeda, Lithuania, which he also ran from 2004 to 2007.

He also holds a B.A. in Visual Design and an M.A. in Design from the Vilnius Academy of Arts in Lithuania, as well as a Ph.D. in Design Interactions from the Royal College of Art in London, UK.

Urbonas has declared that this experience contributed to developing “gravitational aesthetics,” an art and design approach based on manipulating “bodily perceptions of gravity” to create experiences that push the body and imagination to their extremes. Urbonas discussed this concept in multiple articles and papers.

3. The Euthanasia Coaster exists as a scale model

Some people thought that the Euthanasia Coaster was proposed as a real euthanasia machine, but it is merely an artistic concept that’s meant to be thought-provoking.

Urbonas drew the plans for the coaster and created a scale model using etched brass, acrylic paint, carbon fiber, and plywood. However, he declared that he had no intentions to build it in real life and emphasized that it’s a “hypothetical death machine” that would take lives “with elegance and euphoria.”

This word choice is not improvised. As Urbonas told Vice in 2014, the terms he used to describe the Euthanasia Coaster ride “refer to both the physiological as well as aesthetic and ethical definitions of pleasure.”

Cerebral hypoxia is, in fact, one of the reasons why smoking cigarettes or strangulating yourself intentionally may produce euphoria —and by inducing cerebral hypoxia for a prolonged period of time, the Euthanasia Coaster may also induce euphoria before it kills.

4. The Euthanasia Coaster has seven clothoid inversions

According to explanations from the inventor and images of the design itself, the Euthanasia Coaster would take riders through a steep-angled chain hill to a considerable height —up to 1,600 feet (500 meters) to the top. This climb would be slow, lasting several minutes so that passengers can contemplate their lives and their decision to end it.

Once at the top, riders would be given the chance to go back to safety or press a button to continue with the ride —a 1,600-foot (500 meters) drop at a maximum speed of 220 mph (360 km/h).

Thanks to this acceleration, the Euthanasia Coaster would be able to pass through seven clothoid inversions.

A clothoid, also known as an Euler spiral, is a specific type of curve used to achieve smooth transitions between straight tracks and curves. In roller coaster design, “clothoid inversion” refers to an upside-down clothoid curve. It resembles aninvertedteardrop and is used to deliver less intense G-forces throughout the element.

In the case of the Euthanasia Coaster, each inversion would have a smaller diameter than the previous ones so that the coaster would be able to sustain a lethal 10 g-force that kills riders as the train slows down naturally.

Passengers would be wearing biomonitoring suits that would confirm their death at the end of the ride. Survivors, if there were any, would be eligible for participation in a subsequent round. But Urbonas has expressed that survival is unlikely as “the result would be guaranteed by seven-fold repetition.”

The whole ride would be about 0.3 miles (500 meters) long.

5. The Euthanasia Coaster could also be used for execution

Urbonas told Vice that the Euthanasia Coaster could be used for both euthanasia and execution.

In one of his most controversial commentaries, Urbonas said that he would turn the ride into a “spectacle” for family members of the euthanized people or the victims of the criminals sentenced to capital punishment.

6. The Euthanasia Coaster is not flawless

The Euthanasia Coaster gained media attention after being introduced at the HUMAN+ exhibit at the Science Gallery in Dublin in 2011 and Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona in 2015.

It has generated a wide range of reactions since then —from people volunteering to “test it” if it ever was built in real life to people who found the flaws of the Euthanasia Coaster’s design.

According to Urbonas, a NASA engineer pointed out in a sci-fi blog that the Euthanasia Coaster had some minor errors in aerodynamics and that the ride could be survivable by amputees or people with smaller legs as they could experience less pooling of blood in the lower extremities.

Urbonas, most likely guided by his medical advisor, Dr. Michael Gresty of the Spatial Disorientation Lab at Imperial College of London, wrote that potential survivors could experience uncontrolled movements in arms and legs as they regain consciousness and as neurons in the brain, replenished with extra oxygenated blood pumped harder from the heart, start firing again.

After regaining consciousness, the person may still be confused, disoriented, and unable to remember what happened for a few hours. In the meantime, red pinpoints might appear on the survivor’s skin, caused by blood leaking through the blood vessels during the ride.

Additionally, a pilot suggested that one could survive the ride with few side effects by wearing “anti-gravity pants.”

High-performance jet pilots do, indeed, wear “anti-gravity” suits to help counteract the effects of high gravitational forces when aircraft undergo rapid changes in speed, direction, or altitude. These suits inflate with air to compress the pilot’s legs and abdomen, preventing blood from accumulating in the lower extremities and reducing the risk of losing consciousness during high gravitational forces maneuvers.