The Loneliest Place

Point Nemo is the loneliest place on earth. It is a point in the Pacific Ocean, about 2,688 kilometres from the nearest land. If you can get a foothold in Point Nemo, what you see all around you will be water and nothing but water, leaving aside the sky above. Water, sky and you. What greater solitude can you ask for?

Maybe Henry Miller would be happy there as he could ponder his ‘shame and his despair’ in seclusion. He wanted to do that, according to his Tropic of Cancer, in the vacant sunshine, without companions, without conversation, face to face with himself, with only the music of his heart for company.

Maybe Virginia Wolf could be her own real self, sitting by herself “like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake.”

Lord Byron can find his bliss there. Though it is not the “pathless woods” that he longed for. But the rapture he wanted so much on “the lonely shore” might come by. “There is society, where none intrudes, / By the deep sea, and music in its roar.”

You will get solitude at Point Nemo, the place named after Captain Nemo of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. But the remnants of Nemo’s submarine will keep floating around you to haunt your solitude.

Yes, Point Nemo, the farthest place on earth from human habitation, is in fact the cemetery of spaceships and manmade satellites. Alas! You have no escape from manmade pollution!

Some 300 spacecraft have been intentionally deorbited and directed to their eternal rest in Point Nemo. You will have the company of Russia’s 120-ton Mir Space Station which was buried here in 2001. China’s Tiangong Space Station lost control and fell right here. Elon Musk also has made significant contributions with his many rockets.

There are about 4000 manmade satellites orbiting around the earth. All of them will eventually find their resting place in Point Nemo. On top of that, Space X will be launching 4425 satellites in the future. NASA’s international space centre will die in 2030 and come to rest here itself.

Something worse! You will have the company of plastic too here. 320 microplastic particles were found per cubic metre of water in Point Nemo.

We, homo sapiens, are a disastrous species. No wonder, you want to leave. But don’t go to Point Nemo, the farthest place from human habitation. Maybe, you need to create solitude in your own heart.