Hacker News

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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

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-...)

> 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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?

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.

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

>>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.

This assumes any inside information is distributed across the set of jet owners relatively uniformly. In reality most of the private get guys run dealership chains or well services companies. Nobody is going to bother tipping them all off.

The reality is, much like American wealth, the distribution is super-exponential. If you actually wanted this to be kind of useful, you'd only look at the tail numbers known to belong to people who are associates of US senators, high ranking congressmen, and senior defense officials (Raytheon/LM/NG/Boeing execs).

That said, the *actual* reality is you'll just fucking know because it'll be obvious things are escalating out of control. The government is not mystically competent, they're morons like us just figuring it out as they go along. If things were to somehow pop off unexpectedly you only have somewhere between 3 and 30 minutes which is not enough time to get an aircraft in the air with no notice.

TLDR this doesn't do anything. It's cool though

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The fact that this had none of the visual tells of being a Claude-derived artifact is a relief.