Website tells you if a nuclear apocalypse is about to start!

This is a clever and ambitious website and one built on sound thinking. The threat of nuclear war is not infrequently discussed in the newspapers today. The threat comes from Putin and the Kremlin more often than not. Putin and his supporters are, it itching it appears to send a nuclear bomb towards the UK.

The actual threat of nuclear war is probably quite (very!) remote for obvious reasons. However, many people are probably genuinely concerned about it. There appears to be a bit of a movement towards preparing for possible nuclear war by storing foods and general provisions in a bunker.

The best that the average citizen can do if and when nuclear war is about to break out is to head to a privately constructed concrete bunker in which there are enough provisions to keep the family alive for a couple of months.

But then we have the other people; the billionaires. The people who can run away from urban environments. Depart the big cities and head off in private jets to their second or third home in remote places such as on one of the islands of New Zealand, for example. New Zealand is on the edge of mainstream world populations and therefore less likely to be affected by nuclear fallout or indeed be bombed.

A screenshot from Kyle's website.

This leads me nicely to the concept as devised by Kyle MacDonald, an artist in Los Angeles who works with computer code.

He has created a website which maps in real time the movement of private jets. He says the measure of an impending nuclear apocalypse will be the sudden mass movement of the rich in their private jets to remote places when departing city centres.

His website filters data from a flight tracking service to count business jets flying over the past half hour to compare it with the same half-hour in previous weeks. The algorithm adjusts for holiday periods when of course more flights are expected.

Link to website: Apocalypse Early Warning System

Kyle said: "My general goal here is to give people that hacker mentality to be able to look at what's happening around us and not to see noise, but to actually see some patterns. We are not completely downtrodden and lost of all Hope."

The Times describes his Apocalypse Early Warning System as a "helpful service that tries to monitor the likelihood of imminent nuclear catastrophe by charting how many millionaires are airborne."

Here is the status as per Kyle as at 15:32 (GMT) on 11/05/2026:

• Emergency level 1/5
• 733/31,466 planes airborne
• 8,582 max people airborne
• Deviation: +89(+1.0σ)
• Last Update: May 11, 2:30 PM GMT+1

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P.S. please forgive the occasional typo. These articles are often written at breakneck speed, sometimes using Dragon Dictate. I have to prepare them in around 20 mins. Also, sources for news articles are carefully selected but the news is often not independently verified. And, I rely on scientific studies but they are not 100% reliable. Finally, (!) I often express an OPINION on the news. Please share yours in a comment.