By Anita Bielicka
Staff Writer
“The ultimate roller coaster is built when you send out twenty-four people and they all come back dead.” While browsing the Internet you sometimes tend to find little gems like this quote, and since we all know that the macabre and weird things are at the same time the most exciting ones, this article is about something that is all macabre, exciting and deadly in one – the roller coaster that kills you.
Designed by Lithuanian engineer Julijonas Urbonas, who himself used to work in a theme park, the roller coaster is supposed to be a “dignified” alternative to die when officially allowed to be euthanized – the roller coaster is not some mass suicide machine after all. The three-minute death ride goes as follows: The passengers, being strapped tightly into their seats, are at first hurled up to a height of 1,600ft (ca. 510m), just to be flung through nine loops and to die from cerebral hypoxia (lack of oxygen in the brain) induced by a deadly g-force, all of that at a approximate speed of 223 m/ph (give k/mh). The passengers’ experience would be limited to first excitement, then hallucination, and in the end a loss of consciousness and eventual death.
Now before you get too scared or excited because of all this, do not worry, the coaster is so far only a hypothetical design and merely exists in the form of a model design on the scale of 1:500, let alone the fact that active euthanasia is illegal in most countries and will remain so in the near future. It is an interesting topic of discussion nonetheless, and has sparked some discussions among those who heard about it.
When I explained the concept and working of the coaster to my peers, they were usually at first struck in disbelief and then repulsed by the idea of turning a fun leisure machine into something so dire or even perverse – which brings us to the larger philosophical question: Why do we, as a culture, perceive death and deadly things as evil?
Urbonas himself said that by designing the roller coaster he intended to incorporate death more into our cultural understanding, since in the end, well, it catches up to us all and yet we don’t want to hear anything about it.
Personally I still do not know what to think of the roller coaster (it’s just bloody weird you know), but I think that Urbonas certainly has an interesting point in his purpose for the design, and after all, the drawing is a somewhat exciting piece of art in itself.
Anita Bielicka, class of 2015, is a Politics and Law major from Bremen, Germany.
