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The most extreme roller coaster ever designed has never been built, never carried a single passenger, and never turned a wheel. For more than fifteen years, it has provoked engineers, ethicists, philosophers, and the general public in ways that most actual theme park rides never could. It sits in exhibition halls as a brass scale model no bigger than a coffee table, and it is, by deliberate design, a machine intended to kill every person who rides it.
Lithuanian artist and designer Julijonas Urbonas conceived the euthanasia coaster in 2010 and built it as a scale model while completing his PhD at the Royal College of Art in London. The goal of the ride, he stated, is to take lives “with elegance and euphoria,” either for euthanasia or execution purposes.
Between 2003 and 2007, Urbonas ran an amusement park in Klaipeda, Lithuania, where he developed first-hand experience crafting situations involving what he termed “gravitational aesthetics.” That background sits at the heart of why the euthanasia coaster exists at all, and why it refuses to be dismissed as a simple provocation.
Influenced by his father’s work as the director of an amusement park, as well as Soviet and post-Soviet ideologies, Urbonas built an artistic practice combining personal, emotional experience with futuristic speculation. The coaster was its logical endpoint.
The Concept: What the Ride Actually Does
The speculative design proposes a slow ascent of 510 meters (roughly 1,700 feet) into the air before launching passengers down seven loops at a speed of 100 meters per second. The ride aims to take riders through a range of experiences: from euphoria to thrill, tunnel vision to loss of consciousness, and eventually to death.
The euthanasia coaster would kill its passengers through prolonged cerebral hypoxia, an insufficient supply of oxygen to the brain. The ride’s seven inversions would subject passengers to sustained g-forces well above the threshold at which g-LOC occurs, causing symptoms that begin with greyout, progress through tunnel vision to blackout, and ultimately produce g-force induced loss of consciousness and death.
Fighter pilots train extensively to resist g-LOC, which can occur at sustained forces above 4-5g. Brief g-force peaks cause some people to pass out on conventional roller coasters. The euthanasia coaster’s design extends the time riders are subject to high g-forces specifically to induce cerebral hypoxia, loss of consciousness, and death.
The Architecture of the Ride
The ride holds a single passenger in one coaster cart, carries them up to a height of 1,600 feet, and allows several minutes of contemplation should they decide to abandon the fatal journey. If they choose to continue, they press a “fall” button, and the cart proceeds down the steep drop at high speed.
The drop takes the train to approximately 100 meters per second before flattening out and speeding into the first of seven progressively smaller loops. Those seven inversions subject riders to sustained g-forces that exceed what any unprotected human body can withstand, causing symptoms progressing from greyout through tunnel vision to blackout and eventually g-LOC. Depending on an individual’s tolerance to g-forces, the first or second inversion causes cerebral anoxia, rendering the rider brain dead.
Subsequent inversions, or a second run of the coaster entirely, serve as insurance against unintentional survival of more physically robust passengers. Urbonas also proposed that riders wear biomonitoring suits to confirm death at the end of the ride, and that the cart be equipped with a health monitoring system for additional assurance.
The Scale Model
Urbonas drew the engineering plans and created a scale model using etched brass, acrylic paint, carbon fiber, and plywood. The model was built at a ratio of 1:500.
Why Urbonas Built It: The Three Stated Motivations
When asked directly by Vice what inspired the concept, Urbonas identified the key sources of inspiration as “the halt of roller-coaster progress, the extinction of death rituals, and the current development in sci-fi design.”
The Halt of Roller Coaster Progress
Urbonas noted that throughout the history of amusement parks, rides have been developed around a dimension of intensity, becoming faster, taller, and more extreme, to the point where there are no longer real possibilities to upgrade them further, because the peak of stimulation of the human body has already been reached. The euthanasia coaster, in this reading, is a logical monument to the end of an engineering tradition. The rollercoaster, as he conceived it, is the ultimate amusement ride that leaves no room for further innovation.
The tallest roller coaster ever actually built, Falcon’s Flight in Saudi Arabia, stands 163 meters tall. The euthanasia coaster, at 510 meters, sits in a category of engineering that is currently unbuildable.
The Extinction of Death Rituals
Urbonas designed the coaster as an explicit alternative to what he described as “medicalized, secularized, and sterilized” palliative death, saying that “in the roller coaster, I introduced a ritual of doing that.” He elaborated: “Ritual is brought back to the contemporary description of death.”
Urbonas has been careful to clarify that he neither encourages nor discourages assisted suicide, but observes that euthanasia is legal in some countries and “executed in an extremely boring fashion,” proposing that humane voluntary death could be made more meaningful, personal, and ritualistic.
Western clinical death, the hospital bed, the intravenous line, the fluorescent lighting, is largely stripped of ceremony. Urbonas described falling as “a unique experience that sets itself apart from other types of death,” where there is “a fraction of time for reflection before death comes.” In the coaster, this is deliberately prolonged: the ride up the tower, the drop, the serpentine fall, the series of loops, and eventually the fatal ride within the last loop. The spectacle, he proposed, would be open for the public to watch, be it the relatives of the rider or the witnesses to an execution. For the rider, it is “a painless, engaging, and ritualized death machine.” For those watching, it is a “monumental mourning machine.”
The Development of Speculative Design
The third motivation places the euthanasia coaster within a broader tradition of critical or speculative design, work that uses the language of engineering and product development to ask uncomfortable philosophical questions. Urbonas has said that the project was not born from suicidal thoughts or any depreciation of life. On the contrary, it came from an intense interest in life and fascination with amusement rides, becoming his way of saying “you only live once, so be careful what you wish for.”
Urbonas has described his overall practice as “gravitational aesthetics,” an art and design approach based on manipulating “bodily perceptions of gravity” to create experiences that push both the body and imagination to their extremes. The euthanasia coaster is the most extreme expression of that approach.
The Medical Advisor and the Science
The project was not conceived in isolation from scientific input. The medical advisor for the euthanasia coaster was Dr. Michael Gresty of the Spatial Disorientation Lab at Imperial College London. Gresty’s area of expertise covers the neurological and physiological effects of spatial disorientation, exactly the domain the ride exploits.
Urbonas explained in a 2014 interview that cerebral hypoxia is one of the reasons why activities that temporarily reduce oxygen to the brain can produce euphoria, and by inducing it for a prolonged period, the coaster may produce that euphoric state before killing the rider. In Urbonas’s own words: “When the brain starts to suffocate, people usually become euphoric because the brain concentrates on very vital activities.”
G-LOC has been extensively studied in aerospace medicine because it poses a serious risk to fighter pilots. The critical difference between those pilots and the hypothetical riders is that every safety system in aviation tries to prevent sustained g-LOC, while the euthanasia coaster is specifically engineered to guarantee it cannot be avoided.
The Question of Survival
After the design was made public, a NASA engineer identified a potential flaw in a science fiction blog: some “minor errors” in aerodynamics and friction that suggested amputees or riders with smaller legs might survive, because there would be less or no volume in the lower extremities in which blood could pool.
Urbonas confirmed that riders wearing the anti-g-force clothing used by pilots to prevent blackout during intense flights would theoretically be able to live through the ride. He described this as the “hacked thrill ride,” a potential alternative use of the structure for the most extreme recreational experience physically conceivable rather than as an end-of-life device.
Exhibition History and Cultural Impact
The euthanasia coaster was first shown as part of the HUMAN+ display at the Science Gallery in Dublin in 2011, which was later named the year’s flagship exhibition by the Science Gallery. The scale model was also displayed at the HUMAN+ exhibit at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona in 2015.
In 2014, the project was featured in MoMA’s “Design and Violence” online platform, an 18-month curatorial experiment organized by Paola Antonelli and Parsons professor Jamer Hunt. The curators described the work as “preposterous as a technical device” but acknowledged it worked as a provocation regardless of intent. In 2013, it appeared in the “Merry Melancholy” exhibition at Eskilstuna Art Museum in Sweden, and the following year Urbonas included the model in his solo exhibition “Standing, Falling, Levitating” at Galerija Vartai in Vilnius. The design concept was awarded the Public Prize of New Technological Art at Update 2012.
Urbonas is also the founder of the Lithuanian Space Agency, which researches space architecture and gravitational aesthetics, an institution that reflects the same interdisciplinary ambition that produced the coaster in the first place.
The Cultural Ripple
The ride’s influence has extended well beyond gallery walls. In 2012, Norwegian rock group Major Parkinson released “Euthanasia Roller Coaster,” a digital single with lyrics alluding to Urbonas’s design. Sequoia Nagamatsu’s novel “How High We Go in the Dark,” published in January 2022, prominently features a euthanasia roller coaster for children afflicted with an incurable plague. The 2023 television series “Mrs. Davis” also features a roller coaster as a method of ending one’s life.
In 2024, the concept experienced renewed public attention through social media simulations on TikTok, where users created virtual first-person perspective videos depicting the ride’s sequence of acceleration, loops, and fatal g-forces, illustrating the hypothetical 500-meter drop reaching speeds of 360 km/h followed by seven inverted loops inducing cerebral hypoxia.
Since its initial presentation to the public, the project became a significant media phenomenon, drawing extensive coverage from international outlets and inspiring dedicated television segments, songs, a film script, a series of virtual replications, science fair projects, and tattoos.
The Ethical Debate It Forced Open
The design drew concern from anti-euthanasia association Care Not Killing, which objected to it as a hypothetical means of euthanasia. MoMA’s own curators were publicly divided on its intent and effect, with some reading it as a genuine attempt to animate a disgraceful idea so that it could be rejected more easily, and others finding no evidence to support that charitable interpretation.
Urbonas has consistently pushed back against a purely provocative reading. He has acknowledged feeling his own responsibility for the debates the coaster sparked on the sensitive topic of euthanasia, which led him to build an intellectual background for the project by consulting ethicists, a suicide psychologist, and an aerospace physiologist.
Discussing the coaster concept, Urbonas acknowledged it could theoretically be applied to dystopian scenarios, curbing overpopulation or assisting those who feel their lives have gone on “too long,” but maintained that its sympathetic core purpose is to assist people who want to end their lives with one final, meaningful experience.
On the question of his own relationship to death, Urbonas has said: “I’m not sure if I’m afraid of death. It’s one thing to imagine it and another to encounter it physically. What I am sure of is the fear of slow death due to terminal illness that would impose a burden to my relatives. In terms of afterlife, I retain an agnostic view.”
The euthanasia coaster is not a manifesto for death. It is a design response to a specific fear: the indignity of dying badly, slowly, and without agency.
Key Takeaways
The euthanasia coaster remains, sixteen years after its conception, a hypothetical object. No evidence of physical prototyping beyond Urbonas’s original 2010 scale model has ever emerged. No jurisdiction has entertained it as a real euthanasia method. No theme park has attempted anything approaching its 510-meter structure.
What it has done is force a specific set of questions into spaces that rarely consider them together: the design of death, the loss of ritual in clinical dying, the physics of human consciousness at its absolute limits, and the ethics of creating art that treats mortality as its medium.
The design itself is built on verified aerospace medicine: the sustained g-forces the coaster’s seven inversions would impose exceed what any unprotected human body can survive. The euphoria that cerebral hypoxia can produce, well documented in aviation research, is what Urbonas drew on to argue that the death the ride delivers could be, physiologically, a pleasant one. Whether that constitutes dark art, serious bioethical inquiry, tasteless provocation, or some combination of all three is a question the work deliberately refuses to answer for you.
Urbonas has said the coaster is “a prop for a non-existent horror movie, a real fiction, a black humour scenography, social sci-fi design, the world’s most extreme ride, a mourning sculpture, a monument for the end of the carousel evolution.” The fact that it can hold all those descriptions at once, without any of them quite cancelling the others out, may be the clearest measure of how seriously the thing was built.
What Doesn’t Go Away
Some conceptual works age into irrelevance. The euthanasia coaster keeps returning to the conversation precisely because the questions it raises, about how we die, who controls it, and whether the manner of death carries any meaning, have not gone away. As assisted dying legislation expands across more countries and the medical profession grapples with what “good death” means, the coaster’s provocation lands in sharper territory than it did in 2010.
The harder question the coaster poses is not whether it is ethical to build such a thing. It is whether the way most people currently die, in hospital beds, under fluorescent lights, surrounded by monitoring equipment rather than the people they love, is itself a kind of design failure that nobody bothered to call by that name. Urbonas named it. That is why the model is still travelling from gallery to gallery fifteen years later, and why the conversation it started in Dublin in 2011 shows no sign of stopping.
Disclaimer: This information is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment and is for information only. Always seek the advice of your physician or another qualified health provider with any questions about your medical condition and/or current medication. Do not disregard professional medical advice or delay seeking advice or treatment because of something you have read here. AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.
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