Kill Yourself Gently

‘Futurama’ fans are responsible for numerous memes that inflated the net over the past years. We all love and often use the ‘Shut up and take my money’ moment to illustrate items we actually consider cool. But one of my favorite ones is for sure a suicide booth.

Remember the moment, when Bender decided to end up his robotic life and had to pay 25с for his own death? That was when he met up his best friend ever – Fry, who has mistaken a suicide booth for a phone booth. Bender was going to kill himself as he realized that all the metal he was bending was to be used for those suicide machines, but not for something good.

The booth really gave him a wide range of suicide methods. It offered three modes of death: “quick and painless”, “slow and horrible”, which is apparently synonymous with “collect call”, and “clumsy bludgeoning”. Luckily, Bender remained alive, but the prototype of such machines remained in our heads. And it stayed there until a ‘euthanasia enthusiast’ invented the real-world suicide machine in 2017. This thing is called a ‘Sarco capsule’.

Unlike the cartoon, a real-life invention has just one mode – a quick and painless death. Just what most of the people would wish for themselves. No, there is no option to go and buy this thing at the local store. It works way much easier. After planning a suicide, one should go and get a 3D printer. All drafts and schemes are planned to be freely available online. After that, a user will have to pass a quick online test at the end of which they will receive a code that opens a capsule.

Just get inside, lay down and relax. As soon as the ‘victim’ is ready, the capsule will be filled with liquid nitrogen to kill him or her. People feel nothing, they just fall asleep to never wake up again. I bet Goths will love the idea and will be among the very first customers. I don’t mean they want to kill themselves, but this is just a nice opportunity of keeping death so close to themselves.
Sarco capsule consists of two parts: the pod, which can be detached and used as a coffin, but the lower part of it (the base) is reusable. Developers say that it is nice to give people choice when it comes to their death and funerals. Just imagine, you can take shower, use your fave shampoo, perfume and put on the shirt you really like, not the one your family chooses for you. Then take any pose you like inside the container and fall asleep to never wake up again. You can even choose the time and the place for your death.

Philip Nitschke, the inventor of the capsule said, that development of the Sarco machine had been prompted by “a growing demand for choice by the elderly as populations age” and the “difficulty and associated legal issues associated with sourcing the best end-of-life drugs”.