Suicide booth

A suicide booth is a fictional machine for committing suicide. Suicide booths appear in numerous fictional settings, including the American animated series "Futurama" and the manga "Gunnm"/"Battle Angel Alita". Compulsory self-execution booths were also featured in an episode of the original "Star Trek" TV series.

The concept can be found as early as the 1895 story "The Repairer of Reputations" by Robert W. Chambers, in which the Governor of New York presides over the opening of the first "Government Lethal Chamber" in New York City in the then-future year of 1920, following the repeal of laws against suicide: "The Government has seen fit to acknowledge the right of man to end an existence which may have become intolerable to him, through physical suffering or mental despair." (...) He paused, and turned to the white Lethal Chamber. The silence in the street was absolute. "There a painless death awaits him who can no longer bear the sorrows of this life."

Early mentions

In Robert Sheckley's "Immortality, Inc." (1958), the protagonist wakes up in an unfamiliar future and while wandering dazed by a starkly changed New York finds himself in what he thinks might be a bread line, but turns out to be a line for the suicide booths. In the movie Freejack, which is loosely based on Immortality, Inc., the suicide booths themselves are not shown, but advertisements for suicide-assistance services are visible against the city skyline.

In Ivan Efremov's 1968 novel The Bull's Hour a similar idea of suicide booths referred to as the "Palaces of tender death" (]

"The Simpsons"

In the "Simpsons" episode "Million Dollar Abie", a suicide machine called a "Die Pod" (obviously a pun on the iPod) is featured. The Die Pod allows the patient to choose visual and auditory themes that present themselves as the patient is killed.

"Star Trek"

In the "" episode "A Taste of Armageddon", people who were deemed war casualties by the government of Eminiar VII were required to enter suicide booths. Treaty arrangements require that everyone that is calculated as "dead" in the hypothetical thermonuclear war simulated using computers actually dies, without actually damaging any infrastructure. In the end, the computers are destroyed, the war can no longer be calculated in this way, the treaty breaks down, and faced with a real threat, (presumably) peace begins.

After the Heaven's Gate mass suicide event was linked by tabloids to an extreme fascination with science fiction and "Star Trek" in particular it was noted that multiple episodes, including "A Taste of Armageddon", actually advocated an anti-suicide standpoint as opposed to the viewpoint expressed by the Heaven's Gate group.cite web| url=http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/1998-03-26/calendar/sci-fi-so-good/| author=Moorhead, M.V.| title=Sci-Fi, So Good| date=1998-03-26| accessdate=2007-11-02] An episode of "" has also been used to start conversations about medical ethics and assisted suicide during a forum at Central Michigan University.

In reality

The closest thing to a suicide booth to have been actually constructed is the "Euthanasia Machine" invented by Philip Nitschke, consisting of software titled "Deliverance", which asks the patient a series of questions, and automatically administers a lethal injection if the correct answers are made. The system and questions are so constructed that the supplier of the machine cannot be held responsible for ending the life of the patient, who takes responsibility by operating it.

References