Apocalypse Early Warning System

https://ews.kylemcdonald.net/

by carlsborg • 3 months ago

261 127 3 months ago

ews.kylemcdonald.net

Rygian• 3 months ago

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?

esseph2• 3 months ago

Don't want to get shot down?

tgrowazay• 3 months ago

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.

walrus012• 3 months ago

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.

wat10000• 3 months ago

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.

patmcc• 3 months ago

If they have 5 minutes, sure. If they have 5 hours, they'll follow procedure.

PeterisP• 3 months ago

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.

pc862• 3 months ago

99.99% of airports do not have "timeslots on the runway." Most airports in the US have no tower whatsoever.

stouset• 3 months ago

There’s no formality. For planes with ADS-B out, it’s on when the plane is on (barring it being explicitly disabled by yanking the fuse).

Plus transponders are really convenient when you’re trying not to crash into other air traffic. Particularly in a scenario where you might be expecting ATC to be unavailable or abandoning their posts.

V99• 3 months ago

They wouldn't have to set anything. The transponder on almost any modern plane defaults to automatically on, either immediately or at takeoff. With Mode C (reporting altitude) or S (& reporting more) and squawking 1200 (VFR).

decker• 3 months ago

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.

roxolotl• 3 months ago

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.

quantumleaper• 3 months ago

My bet is it's the day of the Super Bowl or the Las Vegas Grand Prix.

pkaeding4• 3 months ago

So, if you see a 5, you are probably fine. If it gets up to 6 or 7, maybe start worrying.

Tepix3• 3 months ago

You don‘t get to worry much then because 5 is the max level

hammock3• 3 months ago

I would like to see the backtest on this tool- what were the most recent dates that were Level 5, 4, 3 and 2?

kcimc• 3 months ago

scroll down to "Traffic Archive", select "1 month" and drag the slider while checking the "Historical Emergency Level" plot.

NunoSempere• 3 months ago

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

beej712• 3 months ago

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.

andrewla• 3 months ago

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.

aorloff• 3 months ago

On Polymarket, $60m has been wagered on "Will Jesus return before 2027"

https://polymarket.com/event/will-jesus-christ-return-before...

ashleyn• 3 months ago

This is essentially the premise to Fallout, or at least the leadup to it.

jshier• 3 months ago

Also Paradise on Hulu, or at least the setup there as well.

pndy• 3 months ago

Any chances you'll recall the title? It sounds interesting

beej712• 3 months ago

I had to dig through my "booksread.tsv" file a bit.

It's _The Future_ by Naomi Alderman.

singpolyma3• 3 months ago

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

prerok• 3 months ago

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.

acidburnNSA• 3 months ago

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...

omiliyomami• 3 months ago

Oh this is really cool

johnfn• 3 months ago

This is so good! You have to bring this back!

bombcar• 3 months ago

Waffle House has to be integrated somehow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffle_House_Index

moritzwarhier• 3 months ago

The current worst headline is:
Self-Described Vampire Pleads Guilty to Threatening Judge

Hahaha :)

Miss such innocent apocalyptic indicators. Well, reading the linked archived article, maybe not that innocent. Just not as relevant.

jandrewrogers• 3 months ago

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.

PorterBHall• 3 months ago

Is it the end of the world or just Davos?

knownjorbist2• 3 months ago

I'd like to see this site the week of the Superbowl.

gambiting• 3 months ago

>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.

bottlepalm3• 3 months ago

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

gyomu• 3 months ago

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.

lostlogin• 3 months ago

Good luck to them. Having Luxon or Peter crawl up their arse on arrival will have them wishing for a fiery death.

neilv• 3 months ago

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.

bottlepalm3• 3 months ago

I don't care. And I guarantee you most wealthy people don't care either. A few eccentric wealthy people do and you think r/preppers is filled with the elite - it's not.

Reminds me this this post from Reddit the other day from someone who believes AI is a conspiracy perpetuated by the rich people: https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/comments/1syeppa/am_i_ov...

petercooper• 3 months ago

Bloomberg Terminal chat?

knownjorbist2• 3 months ago

I think news of such an impeding scenario would probably percolate through their circles first, before the wider media.

DANmode2• 3 months ago

How private the Bilderberg Meeting and group are is up to your interpretation.

elzbardico4• 3 months ago

Well, there's a fucking giant very busy revolving door between the federal government and the private sector. Those people have connections, but they are also able interpret open source intelligence signals and their implications in a way that most of us can't, because we don't know the internal machinery.

In fact, most big banks and other big companies have retired defense and intelligence people explicitly working on risk assessment.

bottlepalm3• 3 months ago

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.

palmotea2• 3 months ago

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.

nolroz2• 3 months ago

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.

palmotea2• 3 months ago

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.

tuatoru• 3 months ago

Nuclear war is immanent to our civilisation and human nature, but perhaps not imminent.

kmoser2• 3 months ago

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-...)

chromacity• 3 months ago

there's a good chance a nuclear apocalypse is imminent.

Or that an excavator took out some fiber.

voxadam• 3 months ago

For network engineers is there really any difference between an excavator taking out your network and an actual apocalypse?

hammock3• 3 months ago

Or the Polymarket hairdryer mafia is out in force

kmoser2• 3 months ago

Except that taking out fiber won't generally result in a roughly circular shape of lost signals, with the ones still remaining on the fringes giving readings that off the charts.

jjwiseman• 3 months ago

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

c22• 3 months ago

I dunno, this guy's setup looks pretty decent: https://youtu.be/2IsR06zf8nQ

jongjong• 3 months ago

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

inatreecrown2• 3 months ago

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

pkaeding4• 3 months ago

The tracked set is built from FAA registry data

So I imagine planes in other countries exist, but the US FAA doesn't have data on them.

walrus012• 3 months ago

You wouldn't need FAA ownership data and details on who/what owns what tail number to track "flying" or "not flying" status of the world's fleet of bombardier global 6000/7000/8000, dassault falcon 7x and similar, given open data from ads-b exchange.

_alternator_2• 3 months ago

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.

riffraff• 3 months ago

I think the point is exactly that some people do have better information for wars.

In COVID's case nobody knew how governments all over the world would react and how bad the situation would get (and rich people weren't particularly affected anyway) but for wars we do have regular insider trading happening because it's easy to know more or less exactly "there is going to be an attack".

noworld• 3 months ago

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/u-s-special-forces-won-409k-bet...

Another indicator we could track.

elzbardico4• 3 months ago

Just because they flew to New Zeland at time D, it doesn't mean they were not aware of the situation in time D - x.

_alternator_2• 3 months ago

Correct. But this indicator is "when do the vast majority of wealthy people actually take to the air?" Which means it's 'belief' lagged by however long it takes them to get in the air. And the fact is, most wealthy people dont actually have particularly good inside information. Even if a small percent do, this indicator won't see it.

We will all know from the news that something really bad is about to happen before this indicator goes high. Polymarket is a way better indicator.

tolerance• 3 months ago

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

satisfice• 3 months ago

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.

vaadu• 3 months ago

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.

TheOtherHobbes2• 3 months ago

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.

wishfish• 3 months ago

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.

pohuing• 3 months ago

We were able to watch some of the movements to Venezuela and Iran in advance of hostilities.

These were deliberately visible to show that the US is not messing around this time. A mass evacuation would never advertise in ads-b. But perhaps you could see a drop in activity as hidden planes get priority on the runway?

nonameiguess• 3 months ago

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.

Nevermark• 3 months ago

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

HNisCIS• 3 months ago

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

TheOtherHobbes2• 3 months ago

There are questions about who would be launching all-out nuclear war on the US when there are such obvious and effective indirect means of destruction.

If you want to destabilise an economy, destroy science and R&D, nuke healthcare, ruin decades of trust with allies, disassemble democratic checks and balances, co-opt the media, and give most of the population a nervous breakdown that has them believing batshit divisive nonsense, you certainly don't need nuclear weapons to do it.

jjk1665• 3 months ago

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.

fwipsy• 3 months ago

I think this is meant to detect insider knowledge of imminent risk of a nuclear attack. It's not meant to detect if nukes are already inbound.

mbonnet• 3 months ago

That, or any other potentially apocalyptic event

pixl97• 3 months ago

Unless the prez misses the nurse button and hits nuke

jjk1665• 3 months ago

Okay but that wouldn't produce the signal "all of the planes have suddenly taken off at the same time." No one who knows Manhattan's going to be nuked on Tuesday is going to be in Manhattan on Tuesday counting on their plane to get them out.

dmoo• 3 months ago

There’s also a non-zero chance that the pilot left without you.

Tepix3• 3 months ago

Insiders.

Most rich people work in cities.

They will want to get to their hideaways quickly.

jjk1665• 3 months ago

Most rich people work in cities.

People with private plane wealth aren't going into work near a potential nuclear strike target when nuclear war is imminent.

ErroneousBosh• 3 months ago

Your plane's electronics are going to get fried by EMPs.

Oldschool piston engine aircraft with magnetos will probably be fine.

If you wanted to be really sure, look into the diesel engine conversions based on good old Peugeot XUDs - and your Citroën BX will be unaffected too ;-)

elzbardico4• 3 months ago

Well connected people probably have access to the kind of insider information that would allow them to escape the hot zone with hours, even days of advance.

And they have the money to pay for the people who can interpret this information and assess the risks.

Most of the time, they use this information to do some nice trades. But should things start to get very seriously moving towards a Nuclear Confrontation, they would probably know it way before us.

Nowadays, the US or Israel are the most probable countries to initiate a first strike, but this wouldn't happen before a large preparation window where the information would have time enough to reach the top of our rulling class.

jjk1665• 3 months ago

Well connected people probably have access to the kind of insider information that would allow them to escape the hot zone with hours, even days of advance.

Which would not result in them scrambling to get airborne all at once, and thus not produce the signal that this site is set up to look for. The elites may have a more precise estimate on when exactly a war's going down, but they also have no reason to stick around ground zero till the last minute.

cineticdaffodil• 3 months ago

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

luke-stanley• 3 months ago

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.

jackhalford• 3 months ago

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

nightsd01• 3 months ago

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

Apocalypse Early Warning System

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