I made something like this in like 2007 called Apocalypse Feed. It took in a few factors and aggregated them into a 0-to-100 number that updated and published over RSS. First it pinged debian mirrors around the world and made a map based on mirror city's lat/long: green for online, red for offline. If there was a cluster of red, that part of the world was considered gone. Then it checked space weather data and nearest asteroid, increasing the value if it was looking bad. It scraped news headlines looking for key words like zombie, pandemic, virus, war, bomb, etc. These fed into a pie graph showing what "type" of apocalypse was most likely at any given time.

It was all fun and games until my VPS host banned me for pinging too many people every few mins.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110516084503/http://www.apocal...

> we suspect that many people who have access to private jets will immediately take to the skies and escape city centers.

I would bet on the exact opposite. Unless you're within a few hundred meters of ground zero you're better off seeking shelter than trying to run, and if you are running you only want to go those few hundred meters and then take shelter. The local airport where your plane presumably is would be far more likely to be targeted than your current location. Traveling to the airport, especially in the chaos of people scrambling for shelter, is probably going to take much longer than you have time for and you are much more exposed than if you went into a basement/subway/concrete stairwell. Even if you could physically get to the airport in time, that doesn't do you much good if the plane isn't ready to go. If the plane is on hot-standby you might be able to take off within 10 minutes of getting to the airport, but if we're assuming this is a sudden development you gotta get the crew to the plane, you need to fuel the plane, etc; you're not getting off the ground in less than half an hour. If by some miracle you could get up in the air before the nuke hit, the air is the worst possible place to be. There is nothing between your plane and the pressure wave of the nuke. Your plane's electronics are going to get fried by EMPs. There's a decent chance your pilot will go blind depending on where the nuke actually hits. Even if you manage to stay in the air - now what? You need to land eventually. Most airports have been destroyed, and air traffic control is probably down or at best too busy to deal with you so you don't know if you're actually going to be able to land at any particular destination. Absolute best case scenario you land in a random location where everyone of the ground is several hours ahead of you into a SHTF situation.

I'm not saying nobody will try it, but I would think most people with access to private jets probably have access to or could acquire access to basements in well built buildings that are a decent bit away from likely targets of nuclear strikes.

By definition it's a bit of a lagging indicator, unless we assume that all these folks have better access to inside information than the rest of us. Given that I was well aware of, for example, the likelihood of a Covid pandemic well before a bunch of rich people flew to New Zealand, it seems likely that CNN is gonna be a better gauge.

Fun idea of a metric, but if I'm reading this correctly, we get roughly one apocalypse warning per year?

> Level 5 is calibrated so only the highest daily peak in the trailing year should exceed it.

> In the event of an imminent nuclear apocalypse, we suspect that many people who have access to private jets will immediately take to the skies and escape city centers.

1. I think the logic behind this particular concept flawed. What's the flight time for an ICBM? 20 minutes if from Russia, and less than that from a submarine? I don't think a billionaire could get to his jet in time, unless he lives on an airstrip like John Travolta. Some might get some early notice if their country planned a first strike (but I doubt it, as loose-lips like that would probably give the enemy notice, too).

2. I think if nuclear war is actually immanent, your best bet of an early warning is an EAS National/Presidential alert (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Alert_System), because I'd hope people with access to actual early-warning sensors would cause one to be sent (while they're getting ready for a second-strike attack). But, given the shambolic nature of post-Cold War government, that could be a foolish hope.

The more effective thing is probably something scanning a news feeds for world events that indicate a major crisis progressing up the escalation ladder. Stuff like conflicts involving nuclear powers, threats of nuclear weapon use, reports of unusual activity of emergency command and control aircraft (like going on alert), use of tactical nuclear weapons, etc.

Can you keep an eye on government planes that would be airborned if the SHTF?

E-4Bs, E-6s, VC-25As, C-32A, etc plus mass helo flights exiting DC.

Topic reminds me of the movie Miracle Mile.

Why are almost all planes in the US? Is this a data problem or are only the US rich enough to fly private jets?

Pinging weather stations should be a good indicator. If you notice a bunch of contiguous ones no longer responding, or sending back huge temperature readings, there's a good chance a nuclear apocalypse is imminent. (Just ignore the few statistical outliers: https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/23/europe/france-weather-sensor-...)

The sad truth is - getting on a private jet would be just about the single worst thing you could do during a nuclear war. Most modern private jets are largely based on flight control systems based on computers and electronics that would be quickly fried by the EMP flash from nuclear weapons even a large distance away. If you wanna die - get on a non-military aircraft during a nuclear exchange

There was a Sci-Fi book I read where this was a service provided to rich people. Basically you signed up for it, and you'd get a text when everything was about to go down. Time to drop everything and fly to your bunker.

I'll ask the obvious: wouldn't the aircraft just take to the skies directly, without bothering with the formality of setting their transponder, if they were knowingly escaping an apocalypse scenario?

This has the same issue as many other types of event warning systems based on noisy, incomplete data.

The latency of constructing a semi-reliable warning signal from the data sources described significantly exceeds the latency of event onset. You can modify the algorithms to reduce latency but then the false positive rate skyrockets. Not what you want for an "apocalypse" early warning system.

To mitigate this you need more data from more diverse sources and lower latency feeds.

Would ADS-B Exchange heatmap files would be accessible at even DEFCON 2? Which raises the question of what it would show when the data sources are not available.

>>we suspect that many people who have access to private jets will immediately take to the skies and escape city centers

Why would that be true? There would never be enough warning to get to the airport and take off anywhere, even if everything else was still working perfectly.

Rich people will start using this to decide when to flee.

Google will use the popularity of this site as a leading indicator in its own index.

Wouldnt absence of the jets be a strong indicator? Like none of the royal family in Saudi Arabia?

Do you think that rich people are on some sort of private 'end of the world' mailing list?

This is more useful than every other "monitoring the situation" dashboard I've seen.

Polymarkets? Bets in units of gold or canned goods, not currency.

But what if they shut down the entire tracking system just before?

I’d prefer to live in a world in which we don’t need this

I have something somewhat similar at <https://blog.sentinel-team.org/>, tracking events that could kill over a million people.

in case of Apocalypse you think they're all filing flight plans?

There are accounts on Twitter that attempt to do this, down to recording encrypted messages and using the existence and pattern of the messages - rather than the text - as a potential clue.

The various doomsday planes regularly take part in nuclear exercises - which are treated as signals for both friends and foes - so there's quite a bit of data to keep.

Conclusion: unless a full first strike is scheduled beforehand and you're high up enough to be in the loop, you're very unlikely to get much notice.

I have little faith that a compound in NZ or HI would be much use unless you move there well ahead of any Event.

And possibly not much after, because with supply chains gone you're going to start running out of essential spare parts and consumables (including medical supplies) within a decade at most.

As someone already mentioned, these are often tracked on Twitter. Just wanted to add: many of these Air Force and government planes use ADS-B so they're easy to follow. Seems to be more tankers and cargo that do. We were able to watch some of the movements to Venezuela and Iran in advance of hostilities. Other interesting things have popped up like US or British intel flights over the Black Sea.

This would be a great thing to add to the apocalypse tracker. Though I guess it might be a bit tricky. Would need to know the baseline of normal operations. And what would be more or less typical while conflicts, like the current one, are ongoing. Then figure out what would be a sufficient deviance from that for alarm thresholds.

You can, but people seem to forget the job of the military when they're not actually fighting a war is to practice fighting wars. I remember this kind of thing happening all the time when I was in. We had a reserve exercise in Texas where someone got a hold of the operations order in media and thought we were going to literally occupy the state. When we ramped down counterinsurgency after leaving Iraq and started sending all the heavy units back to NTC in California to relearn how to be heavy units, a bunch of people saw hundreds of tanks on trains going west and thought it was some kind of real mobilization. My wife used to work on an experimental radar project that flew unmarked planes with no tail numbers out of a commercial airport under a Navy unit that had no official presence and didn't wear uniforms, but it's pretty obvious to anyone watching they're Navy planes because it's identical models but with radar units attached you'd never see on operational craft. People thought they were smuggling drugs, surveilling the public, testing alien tech, whatever crazy shit the Internet can dream up. All they were doing was collecting data for validation testing, flying over land and water they controlled because that's the only way to get real ground truth.

I guess when you grow up, you figure out the internal machinery isn't as interesting as your imagination thinks it is. And also that somehow the people involved are part of some secret network that has the ability to keep the truth from you. That's some good old fashioned 90s x-files mentality.