There’s that old idea: if you see a bunch of people frantically running in one direction, run with them. They’re probably running from something worth running from — a terrorist attack, Godzilla, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man… you get the point. That same logic has now been adapted for the digital age, courtesy of a project that treats billionaire travel habits like an early warning system for the end of the world.
First noticed by Boing Boing, developer Kyle McDonald’s “Apocalypse Early Warning” site is predicated on the simple, cynical premise that if a catastrophe is looming, the rich will know first and flee immediately, like the cowards they are. They’ll get on their private jets and haul tail to their personal quaint and quiet private islands or whatever.
The rest of us, lacking both jets and access to insider info networks filled with other shady mega-powerful oligarchs, some of whom might have had something to do with the oncoming doomsday scenario, will be left to watch the world burn as we refresh a website. Apocalypse Early Warning System evens the odds a little. We may not be privy to their info, but watching them all scatter at the same time is valuable information in itself.
This Website Tracks Private Jets to See If Billionaires Are Fleeing the Apocalypse
The site isn’t your run-of-the-mill private plane tracker. The system pulls from publicly available aviation data, specifically ADS-B signals, which broadcast an aircraft’s position, speed, and altitude in real time. By tracking around 11,000 private and business jets and comparing the number airborne at any given moment against historical norms, the site assigns an alert level from 1 to 5. A normal day hovers at 1. A sudden spike, five standard deviations above the baseline, suggests some s—t is going down.
It’s not entirely different from the so-called Pentagon Pizza Theory, where spikes in late-night food orders near D.C.-area defense buildings hint at looming military activity. Both ideas rely on sussing out patterns of behavior that suggest that all the noise in the data implies something bigger. In this case, a mad private jet dash to the nearest apocalypse bunker, or perhaps to their personal space capsules, so the Musks and Bezoses of the world can retreat to their subterranean lunar villas.
This isn’t a scientifically proven doomsday detector. It’s more of a vibes-based thing. You’ll probably see around as much private jet travel on Super Bowl Sunday as you would on the eve of a nuclear holocaust. Still, it’s a fun if unnerving tool born from modern cynicism and a clear-eyed understanding of who has power and who doesn’t, and who might try to use that power to save themselves as the rest of us get vaporized by alien death rays or get squished by a kaiju.
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