At Point Nemo, the closest people to you are often astronauts.

Point Nemo is the oceanic pole of inaccessibility, the point in the ocean farthest from land. NOAA places it in the South Pacific, roughly 2,688 kilometers from the nearest land. The comparison concerns distance to coastlines and islands, not distance to a city, harbor, permanent settlement or other known group of people.

The International Space Station commonly orbits at an altitude of roughly 400 kilometers. During a sufficiently close pass, astronauts aboard it can therefore be much nearer to a person at Point Nemo than anyone on land. The striking comparison works because vertical separation into orbit can be much smaller than the horizontal distance across an exceptionally remote ocean.

Altitude alone does not establish the astronauts' actual distance. Unless the station is directly overhead, there is also horizontal separation, and the relevant quantity is the straight-line distance to the spacecraft. Its orbit and position at that moment matter. When the station is elsewhere around Earth, its crew is not automatically the closest group of humans.

NOAA gives Point Nemo's coordinates as 48°52.6' south and 123°23.6' west. Its nearest land references are Ducie Island to the north, Motu Nui near Rapa Nui to the northeast and Maher Island near Antarctica to the south. These remote places help define the empty ocean around the point; they are not necessarily occupied settlements.

The location was identified computationally by survey engineer Hrvoje Lukatela in 1992, according to Guinness World Records. Finding it required evaluating geographical distance from land rather than reaching a visible landmark. There is no island, monument or natural marker at the coordinate. A vessel arriving there would still be surrounded by ordinary open ocean.

The name refers to Captain Nemo from Jules Verne's fiction. That literary association suits the location's remoteness, but it does not confer a legal boundary or make the surrounding waters inaccessible. Ships can travel through the area, and an aircraft could pass nearby. Either could change who the nearest people are at a particular moment.

This is why the popular word often is stronger than the geographical evidence alone supports. Establishing a frequency would require time-dependent spacecraft positions together with information about ships, aircraft and their occupants. The land-distance record establishes remoteness from land. It does not, by itself, establish a continuous or statistically measured ranking of all nearby humans.

A place can be remote from coastlines without being empty of traffic, and an uninhabited island does not count as a nearby human presence. The Point Nemo comparison becomes accurate when those distinctions stay separate. First establish the fixed geography, then ask where people actually are at the relevant moment, including above the atmosphere as well as on the ocean.

Point Nemo is remote from land, not necessarily remote from every human being. Those are separate comparisons because people travel on ships, in aircraft and in orbit. The point’s location can be calculated from coastlines without knowing where a single person is. The closest-person claim, by contrast, needs information about traffic and spacecraft positions at a particular moment.