Point Nemo (https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/nemo.html) is located 2,688 kilometers from the nearest landmass; if there are no ships nearby, you could easily be thousands of kilometers away from anyone.

Unless the ISS or the Tiangong is passing overhead.

I wonder what are closest significant shipping/flight routes of Nemo

Likely not much, if you were to go further south, there are a few parallels/latitudes where no landmasses exist. This creates a very hostile environment for maritime vessels due to 90mph (150kph) westerly winds and 50ft (15m) waves. As for planes, most east bound flights from AU/NZ, the great circle route that runs through there doesn’t really go anywhere except to middle Atlantic Ocean, dipping south of Cape Horn. It is a place truly devoid of people.

If I recall correctly, they are actually planning the deorbit of the ISS to land around there precisely because of its proximity to literally nothing.

It seems strange that the article assumes that the country someone currently lives in is relevant.

I'm British but I've been to places like the US, Scandinavia, Russia etc that have huge open expanses.

Never more than 10m away from someone else is obviously just wrong. That's less than following distance on a motorway.

> Never more than 10m away from someone else is obviously just wrong. That's less than following distance on a motorway.

If you live your entire life in a high-density city, you may never have been on a motorway.

But you probably visited a forest/a national park/swam in a sea/a lake etc. I think it’s rather unlikely for someone to live till 20 without making more distance.

Your take is valid though /somewhat/ biased towards the first-world experience. The scenario you dismiss is, for example, actually rather likely for someone living in Dhaka – and that's not to use an extreme "open air prison" example like Gaza where 2 million people are confined to 140 sq miles (365 sq km) without benefit of national parks and with an extremely small fishing zone.

(Although I think one can still do better than being literally within 10m of an individual at all times, which is a bit extreme.)

Certainly I've been to Gaza a couple of times and I've been more than 10m from someone just when I walked down to the beach from the hotel.

100m is probably a bit more of a challenge without deliberately doing it, but I've only been there for a handful of days to a handful of locations, not 20 years. I suspect you could probably do 250m at the right time of day/night at a few places though.

> I think it’s rather unlikely for someone to live till 20 without making more distance.

poverty.

10m is completely ludicrous. I got on the London Underground yesterday and there was noone in my carriage. The carriages are easily 10 metres long.

Or just like, go to any park anywhere.

> like the US, Scandinavia, Russia etc that have huge open expanses.

But most people living/visiting these open spaces are traveling with their family/friends, not alone.

Would Michael Collins (Apollo 11) be the person that has been furthest from any other human ever? (or potentially someone else from one of the Apollo missions?)

The feeling of being on the dark side, with no radio contact must be something quite special

It is.

Zero light pollution, no radio transmission devices, fantastic night skys with stunning views of the milky way.

https://www.lightpollutionmap.info/#zoom=10.00&lat=-26.70316...

https://www.atnf.csiro.au/projects/askap/ARQZWA.html

Al Worden on Apollo 15 holds the record because of a different orbit than the rest of the Apollo missions. 2235 miles from his crewmates.

Was he not up there with 2 other humans?

Arguably they meant average distance

Not while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were down on the surface of the moon. Michael Collins remained in orbit around the moon. Once every forty-odd minutes (the duration of his lunar orbit), he was separated by the entire diameter of the moon (over 3400 km) from the nearest two humans, and completely cut off from radio contact with anyone.

ah wow that's a feat, thanks for your answer!

This guy was at least 400 km from anyone else while on the ISS: https://www.insidehook.com/article/science/nasa-chris-cassid...

> This guy was at least 400 km from anyone else

Well, apart from the two Russian cosmonauts also on board. He was the sole American, not the sole human. Cassidy, however was part of the largest group in space, 13 people, when a Shuttle with 7 crew joined the g-person ISS Expedition 20.

I live on a large open expanse of almost a kilometre in each direction owing to the positioning of this farm relative to the other farm fields in the area, and one of the main problems neighbors and I have is that people from the suburbs think that "nobody lives here." Using rural areas for hiking, fishing, cycling where you are moving and there is a beginning and end to it is fine and very welcome.

Absolutely get far, it's good for the soul but, PSA about being out in nature and rural areas:

What made these places desirable was your absence. Loitering in your cars in front of peoples properties is an abuse of the peace the people who live there have invested in and created. Respect the peace of those places you go. If you are out at night, always turn off your car and all lights and be quiet. The most welcome guests are the ones who leave.

Leaving a car running on stationary is also annoying in the city, never mind polluting both the environment and people for no good reason.

I've had some conversations with neighbors about it. In fact, most of my neighbors have had the same conversation with one or two of our neighbors. The muffler on this guys WRX, which is always on the street instead of inside of his empty garage, vibrates our window frames. He used to make a habit of getting into his car, starting it, and then fucking around on his phone for 30 minutes. It's completely mental.

Thankfully, for our neighborhoods collective sanity, after at least a dozen interactions with him, he's stopped idling in front of his house.

I once got out of bed at 11pm to go out and ask the occupants of a car to turn off the engine, the low rumbling noise was irritating me a lot. Was told they were waiting for their SO to come back from the pizzeria with pizzas. I later learned about misophonia but I still hate it when people leave their engines on more than three minutes before leaving.

I wonder what these “be noisy” car people will do as EVs replace aging WRXes etc. we have a neighbor mid 40s age with a teenage daughter, both super nice, both insanely into loud mufflers. It’s annoying to everyone at first but they are so over the top hobby-level crazy about their custom loud mufflers that everyone seems to have replaced irritation with unavoidable amusement. Like there’s a unique set of cartoon characters living a few houses down. They never sit around idling noisily so perhaps it’s the reason they’re tolerable.

Obviously, what they're going to do is blast music really loud.

I don't get when people get into a loud-idling vehicle (probably with some anti-muffling adjustments), start it, and then let it run without moving for half an hour before driving away. Every day. Does their car/truck/suv really take 30 minutes to warm up before it can drive anywhere?

Other times it's loud vehicle sound systems. I imagine the person inside either isn't aware how annoying it is or doesn't care that they're broadcasting bass to the entire neighborhood.

> for no good reason

in the winter people need the heat on, and in the summer the A/C, and the rest of the time perhaps they're listening to NPR or a podcast or something.

Not making excuses for anybody, not saying they're not annoying, not saying there aren't workarounds, I'm just saying that's when I have the urge to leave my car running. Transferring what I'm listening to to my phone, to transfer it back later, my phone stopping charging, my care locking me in, etc. it's just simpler to maintain steady state than try to imagine all the ways in which I'll be disappointed doing it a different way.

I don't obsess about the same things you obsess about.

There was a place for rent on AirBnb in California which claims to be 7 miles from anything.

There is a lot of federally owned land especially in the mountains. If you managed to hold on to a plot that is surrounded by USFS managed forest, that’s entirely plausible.

Funny, when I search for that place, the first thing that comes up is a place that is 7 miles from Disneyland.

It was way up in the northern part of CA

Author needs to get out to the American West sometime. 1km is chump change out here. I've always been around others when I've traveled but I could have easily traveled alone if I wanted to. Our party has been has often been so far away from others that no other person could be seen for miles around.

I've spent a lot of time in some pretty deep wilderness in the west, and I'm skeptical that I've ever been more than 10km from the nearest other person. I often come across old tracks even when I'm going cross-country. Even some of my secret spots are now getting a lot of traffic (see also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37Hmd-VkMIM). I climb mountains just to get some peace and quiet and half the time there's some other unfortunate soul trying to do the same. I think my most remote trip so far was somewhere in the vicinity of 10T 480360E 4595500N, and even then, I doubt there was more than 10km between me and the next nearest person.

I think what most people are thinking of when they think of wilderness solitude is density of people. The next nearest person might be only 5km, but depending on conditions, I'm not likely to realize they exist. At densities of < 1 person/sq. km., most people start getting that feeling of being "really far out there".

Take a look at Project Remote: https://www.projectremote.com/state-rankings/

They haven't done California or Washington but New Mexico is the most remote in the west so far with 11.5 miles to a road. Even Texas only ranks in at 6.6 miles.

From another human is hard, but I've been on a couple of solo hikes. Overall, the feeling of isolation hits for me at frequency of human detection rather than distance, i.e. when I can see no human and nothing built with human hands for a while. Volcanic craters on rainy days are a good place since you can see all around you and it's wilderness so you can get a good idea that no one's in the crater with you and the jungle obscures the rest.

Especially now, with my girlfriend I think in the last year I have not been more than 100 m from the nearest human. Maybe riding my bike back from SF's business district, but those have security guards in them, so realistically 20 m.

The last hike I did — 60km or so — I encountered... I believe it was 3 distinct groups. Assuming there were also others traveling in my direction, 10km seems reasonable, though unlikely. Probably closer to 8km or so

Just out of curiousity I let Wolfram Alpha divide the total land area by the global population and got roughly 0.0191sqkm per person. That’s about a 130m distance if people were positioned on a grid. Then I found that roughly 57% of people live in cities. Treating the size of those as a negligible term that leaves us with roughly 210m. Then I found that 57% of land is considered uninhabitable which cancels out the city factor, so we are back to roughly 130m. I think this is a neat number as it really puts being kilometers or even tens or hundreds of kilometres away from others into perspective. The human density distribution on earth is really all over the place.

That made me think about professions which enable one to be far from civilisation, but also alone as a singular person.

Apollo Command Module Pilots are the obvious ones. But here on earth?

Pilots, of course. But not on commercial aircraft, and not pilots flying over land. That leaves military pilots in single-pilot jets, think aircraft carrier. And on the civilian site there is a small group of ferry pilots who are transferring small propeller planes from continent to continent by making small pit stops on islands, think Scotland → Iceland → Greenland → Newfoundland. Because of limited storage of avgas on the plane they often fly solo. And pioneers like Amelia Earhart.

Crossing oceans by sailing is another possibility. But bigger ships have bigger crews, just alone for watchstanding. Fishermen, operating alone, don’t sail so much out, I think. The only people doing it really alone are single handed sailors crossing oceans or circumnavigating the world like Dame Ellen MacArthur.

(Ant)arctic explorers are the last one I can think of. People, who are travelling the icecaps alone, on foot, dragging their stuff, replicating the original journeys. Or maybe with dog sleds, if dogs don’t count.