There is a place on Earth – sort of real, sort of theoretical – called Point Nemo. And I love this… place. I will never get there. Very few humans have. It’s not much anyway, even were I, or anyone to get there. I mean, there really wouldn’t be much of a way to know you were at Point Nemo because there’s nothing there.

   Point Nemo is the place on Earth that is farthest from land. Nearly 1700 miles in any direction, as it turns out. The Point is in the South Pacific… somewhere. Here’s a picture.

   Point Nemo is so remote that the closest human to it is probably an astronaut on the International Space Station when it passes over about once a day. The ISS is only 200 some miles from Point Nemo. I love that.

   Point Nemo was invented or created or identified, I suppose, by a Croation engineer barely thirty years ago. He was never there. Just figured it out with math. He named the place for Captain Nemo, a famous fictional explorer from the book, “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” by Jules Verne.

   Another thing to know about Point Nemo’s very large and vacant neighborhood is that it is where we crash much of our space junk. When a no-longer-useful satellite, for example, is plunging toward, say Los Angeles, is it redirected to the place on Earth where it is least likely to hit anything valuable. Or anything, really. That’s the lonely Pacific Ocean around Nemo so the bottom of the sea there is littered – this is true – with old, charred pieces of our space programs. Hundreds of them. 

   So, there are a few hundred words about a place that hardly exists, that was only quite recently ‘discovered’, and that very few of us will ever see – or want to see – but is somehow wonderful.

  

      Mariposa, September 2026

posted to blogger 9/23/26