Outrage after scientist lets the public experience his SUICIDE machine in virtual reality

A controversial 3D-printed death machine designed to send people to the afterlife peacefully will be ‘tested’ by the public for the first time.

The ‘Sarco’ is the creation of 70-year-old Australian euthanasia advocate Philip Nitschke, also known as ‘Dr Death’.

When a button is pressed, the Sarco will fill with nitrogen, resulting in the person losing consciousness after one minute and dying after five minutes.

It will be unveiled at the Amsterdam Funeral Fair on Saturday, where attendees can get a glimpse into what it will be like to step in the Sarco using a virtual reality headset.

However, the plans have already been met with outrage with the machine being described as ‘gruesome’ and ‘glamorising suicide’.

The Sarco is a 3D-printable machine that kills people by hypoxia when oxygen levels are scarce.
A person who wants to use Nitschke’s machine to commit suicide has to do an online test to show that they are sane and want to die of their own will.

They then receive a four-digit code that is valid for 24 hours. After entering the code into the machine, a special button can be pressed to begin the process.

A funeral fair spokesman said that visitors ‘can undergo the entire experience with virtual reality glasses to see if this could be a preferred life ending for them.’

Through the virtual glasses, the visitors can choose a view of the Alps or the sea as their last moment.

They then press the suicide button, after which the sight with their virtual reality glasses will slowly turn black.

Dr Nitschke developed the Sarco with engineer Alexander Bannick in the Netherlands, with the aim of making it available worldwide.

Rather than looking for a ‘dignified’ death, Dr Nitschke says it could a ‘euphoric’ experience.
‘What if we dared to imagine that our last day on this planet might also be one of our most exciting?’ he wrote in an in-depth feature for Huffington Post.

‘It can be transported wherever one chooses’, Dr Nitschke explains, for example facing the Rockies or looking out over the Pacific Ocean.

‘As I say in my workshops, ‘You’re only going to die once, so why not have the best?”, he said.
But the introduction of the death machine has been met with heavy criticism from politicians and social workers.

A spokesman for Dutch suicide prevention hotline 113 said: ‘All of this seems completely unwanted to us.’

MP Kees an der Staaij of the Christian-conservative Reformed Political Party (SGP) said: ‘It is gruesome.

‘All of us together try to do everything to prevent suicide and then you find a suicide machine on the funeral fair like it is the most normal case in the world. Suicide is not a promotional offer and aiding with suicide is a criminal offence in the Netherlands.’

MP Carla Dik-Faber of the Christian Union: ‘I find it bizarre and worrying that companies are promoting machines which lead to death at a fair.’

Dr Peter Saunders, campaign director at Care Not Killing Alliance told MailOnline Dr Nitschke’s ‘shameless promotion of suicide as an answer to life’s problems puts the lives of vulnerable elderly, depressed and disabled people at grave risk’.

‘He is on public record as promoting assisted suicide to anyone who wants it, ‘including the depressed, the elderly bereaved, (and) the troubled teen’ and runs seminars where he advises on the sourcing, supply and use of barbiturates, helium, nitrogen and other means to end one’s life’, he said.

‘This runs the additional danger of glamorising suicide and promoting suicide contagion and breaches both national and international guidelines on suicide prevention’, he said.
Dr Nitschke, who said he never plans to charge for the Sarco design, said that if it came to a point in his own life when he needed to consider euthanasia, he would chose to do it in the machine.