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.
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?
AFAIK the transponder kind of turns itself on when powering on the plane, you'd have to explicitly disable it but then you'd have weird discussions with the airport tower guiding you to a free timeslot on the runway which would just delay your takeoff, since ignoring the airport tower is a good way to not get off the ground at all because you'll accidentally be hit by some other plane.
Colliding with other planes is going to impede your escape plan, so it would still be a good idea to turn the thing on. No further action needs to be taken for the ADS-B output to be correct, it works once it's powered on.
In a theoretical scenario of the billionaire class of the world having some kind of "advance warning" of the apocalypse, they'd be taking to the air in the hours or several days prior to a total disaster happening. Meaning this would be done while the local governments were ostensibly still functioning, in which case you can't just have your private jet depart without active ADS-B and in-the-clear voice traffic for ground, and air traffic control coordination.
If governments and airspace control have already collapsed, post tense, then of course anything goes.
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-...)
Yeah came here to say the same thing. While last year might have been a bit chaotic, this as well, I highly doubt we were as close as it is possible to come to nuclear apocalypse without getting one. This seems like a completely useless metric.
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.
> 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.
I mean - just take a look at all this speculative trading action around the Iran war. Trump is all about "his friends" presumably that means that many of them could get a heads up.
If you're talking about nuclear war, I don't think you could expect Polymarket to pay out in the aftermath. So anyone betting on one would be pretty dumb.
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.
This seems like an area rife for a scam, like hurricane insurance or earthquake insurance. You pocket the money, and when disaster strikes, who is going to sue you when you do nothing? If there was a real bunker-worthy event then all your insurees have been devoured by zombies or dissolved by radioactive strings or whatever.
No, but they have spent tens of millions of dollars on a go bag —> helicopter to private jet -> bunker in New Zealand preplanned route and you haven’t.
Good luck to the billionaires in a real collapse scenario, when their security and support staff can decide that the billionaires are counterproductive, and vote them out of the survival bunkers.
You didn't include the locals, we're not huge fans of being considered a liferaft by people who have actively worked to make the world worse. And we have a can do spirit (and earthmoving equipment...)
>>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.
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...
Very cool, including this gem from 2009:
> The current worst headline is: Self-Described Vampire Pleads Guilty to Threatening Judge
Oh this is really cool
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?
AFAIK the transponder kind of turns itself on when powering on the plane, you'd have to explicitly disable it but then you'd have weird discussions with the airport tower guiding you to a free timeslot on the runway which would just delay your takeoff, since ignoring the airport tower is a good way to not get off the ground at all because you'll accidentally be hit by some other plane.
99.99% of airports do not have "timeslots on the runway." Most airports in the US have no tower whatsoever.
If they have 5 minutes, sure. If they have 5 hours, they'll follow procedure.
Don't want to get shot down?
You won’t get shot down for merely taking off without a transponder.
Worst case scenario a fighter jet will be scrambled to investigate.
But in apocalypse scenario, chances are the fighter jets will be busy with tasks other than enforcing FAA rules.
> But in apocalypse scenario, chances are the fighter jets will be busy with tasks other than enforcing FAA rules.
Depending on the type of event, they very well could be scrambling to shoot down unidentified aircraft.
Fog of war sucks, and friendly fire still happens often.
Colliding with other planes is going to impede your escape plan, so it would still be a good idea to turn the thing on. No further action needs to be taken for the ADS-B output to be correct, it works once it's powered on.
In a theoretical scenario of the billionaire class of the world having some kind of "advance warning" of the apocalypse, they'd be taking to the air in the hours or several days prior to a total disaster happening. Meaning this would be done while the local governments were ostensibly still functioning, in which case you can't just have your private jet depart without active ADS-B and in-the-clear voice traffic for ground, and air traffic control coordination.
If governments and airspace control have already collapsed, post tense, then of course anything goes.
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-...)
> there's a good chance a nuclear apocalypse is imminent.
Or that an excavator took out some fiber.
For network engineers is there really any difference between an excavator taking out your network and an actual apocalypse?
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.
Yeah came here to say the same thing. While last year might have been a bit chaotic, this as well, I highly doubt we were as close as it is possible to come to nuclear apocalypse without getting one. This seems like a completely useless metric.
This is more useful than every other "monitoring the situation" dashboard I've seen.
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.
I'd like to see this site the week of the Superbowl.
Is it the end of the world or just Davos?
> 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.
Nuclear war is immanent to our civilisation and human nature, but perhaps not imminent.
I mean - just take a look at all this speculative trading action around the Iran war. Trump is all about "his friends" presumably that means that many of them could get a heads up.
If you're talking about nuclear war, I don't think you could expect Polymarket to pay out in the aftermath. So anyone betting on one would be pretty dumb.
But betting against one could pay off?
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.
This seems like an area rife for a scam, like hurricane insurance or earthquake insurance. You pocket the money, and when disaster strikes, who is going to sue you when you do nothing? If there was a real bunker-worthy event then all your insurees have been devoured by zombies or dissolved by radioactive strings or whatever.
On Polymarket, $60m has been wagered on "Will Jesus return before 2027"
https://polymarket.com/event/will-jesus-christ-return-before...
I'll definitely put money on that one around December for a quick return. Thanks for the tip
Why wait till December? Aren't there higher returns the earlier you put money?
This is essentially the premise to Fallout, or at least the leadup to it.
Also Paradise on Hulu, or at least the setup there as well.
But what if they shut down the entire tracking system just before?
Do you think that rich people are on some sort of private 'end of the world' mailing list?
No, but they have spent tens of millions of dollars on a go bag —> helicopter to private jet -> bunker in New Zealand preplanned route and you haven’t.
Good luck to them. Having Luxon or Peter crawl up their arse on arrival will have them wishing for a fiery death.
Good luck to the billionaires in a real collapse scenario, when their security and support staff can decide that the billionaires are counterproductive, and vote them out of the survival bunkers.
You didn't include the locals, we're not huge fans of being considered a liferaft by people who have actively worked to make the world worse. And we have a can do spirit (and earthmoving equipment...)
You clearly haven't read articles where they said they were pondering all their employees in those bunkers to have explosives in their neck...
I think news of such an impeding scenario would probably percolate through their circles first, before the wider media.
Bloomberg Terminal chat?
I have something somewhat similar at <https://blog.sentinel-team.org/>, tracking events that could kill over a million people.
>>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.
in case of Apocalypse you think they're all filing flight plans?
If it's early enough, they would have to. And in case it's a false positive, they would be liable.
All this to say, I actually find the thing hillarious, though. If there's an actual apocalypse a plane will not save you.