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The loneliest spot on Earth is where dead spaceships go to die
💡 Point Nemo is the ocean spot farthest from any land, so remote that orbiting astronauts are often the closest people — which is exactly why old spacecraft are steered there to crash.
In the empty South Pacific there is a point of ocean so far from any land that the nearest people are usually not on Earth at all. It's called Point Nemo — the oceanic pole of inaccessibility, the single spot in the world's oceans that is maximally distant from every coastline. Its nearest land lies about 2,700 km away in three directions: a tiny islet near Easter Island, an atoll in the Pitcairn group, and an ice-bound speck off Antarctica.
Because it's so remote from any shore, the closest humans are frequently the astronauts aboard the International Space Station, which orbits just ~400 km overhead — far nearer than the nearest inhabited coast. The point was only pinpointed in 1992, calculated by an engineer using geometry rather than a voyage, and it was named after Jules Verne's submarine captain, whose name is Latin for "no one."
That extreme isolation makes Point Nemo useful: space agencies aim their retired satellites and stations to fall here, into a stretch of sea nicknamed the "spacecraft cemetery." Debris from hundreds of craft — including Russia's Mir station — rests on the seabed below, chosen precisely because almost no one lives anywhere near.