I've reached the age where I can admit something I'd never have said at thirty: sometimes, people are just too much work. I love my family. I like most of my friends. But there are days when I'd like to go somewhere nobody can find me, and stay there until I feel like coming back.

If you live in a city, the traditional answer is to go camping. I've done a lot of camping, and a fair amount of whitewater rafting, and I can tell you the flaw in the plan: there are people there, too. The campsite next to yours has a generator, a radio, and three children who love to play hide-and-seek with strangers.

So where could you go to really get away from everyone? The answer turns out to be a lot farther away than the nearest national forest.

When the Galaxy Was Everything

A hundred years ago, the question would have had a simpler answer. Until the 1920s, most astronomers believed the Milky Way was the universe. Every star, every glowing cloud, everything that existed belonged to one enormous swarm of stars, and beyond its edge there was nothing at all.

There were those fuzzy spirals in the telescopes, of course. Astronomers called them "spiral nebulae", and argued about what they might be. In April of 1920, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis debated the question before the National Academy of Sciences in Washington. Shapley said the spirals were clouds of gas inside our own galaxy. Curtis said they were "island universes", whole galaxies in their own right, unimaginably far away. The debate ended in a draw, the way debates usually do when nobody has the data.

The Letter That Destroyed a Universe

The data came from Edwin Hubble. In October of 1923, working with the new 100-inch telescope on Mount Wilson, Hubble photographed the Andromeda "nebula" and found a star that brightened and dimmed on a regular schedule. He crossed out the "N" he'd written beside it, for "nova", and wrote "VAR!" instead. It was a Cepheid variable, and a decade earlier Henrietta Swan Leavitt had worked out that a Cepheid's rhythm reveals its true brightness. Compare that to how bright it looks, and you know how far away it is. (I explained how that works in Dating The Universe.)

Hubble's answer was nearly a million light-years: far beyond the edge of our Milky Way galaxy. He was off by a factor of almost three, as it happens; Andromeda is about 2.5 million light-years away. But the point stood. When Shapley read Hubble's letter, he reportedly said, Here is the letter that has destroyed my universe. Andromeda was a galaxy, and so were all those other spirals. The universe was suddenly full of them.

The Unfashionable End

Even inside the Milky Way, we don't live in the big city. Douglas Adams, in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, described our Sun as being in the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy, and he wasn't far wrong. We live in the Orion Spur, a minor branch between two of the galaxy's great arms, about 26,000 light-years from the center. Out here, the stars average about five light-years apart. It's the galactic equivalent of a farmhouse at the end of a long dirt road.

For a few decades after Hubble, astronomers pictured the galaxies scattered more or less evenly through space, like raisins in a pudding. Then, in the late 1970s—practically yesterday, as astronomy goes—the pudding turned out to be something else entirely. As they measured the distances to thousands of galaxies, Jaan Einasto and his colleagues in Estonia, and separately Stephen Gregory and Laird Thompson in the United States, noticed that galaxies seemed to gather in long chains and sheets, with enormous empty regions between them.

In 1986, Valérie de Lapparent, Margaret Geller, and John Huchra of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics published a map of one slice of the sky that settled the matter. The galaxies traced out the walls of giant bubbles. (A cluster in the middle happened to look like a stick figure, and the map became famous as "the stick man".)

Today we call the whole arrangement the "cosmic web". Galaxies gather along filaments hundreds of millions of light-years long, the filaments meet at knots where the great galactic clusters sit, and between them lie the voids. It looks less like a pudding than a sponge, or the foam on a glass of beer.

The Great Void

The most famous of the voids lies in the direction of the constellation Boötes. In 1981, Robert Kirshner, Augustus Oemler, Paul Schechter, and Stephen Shectman found that a huge region of space there, centered some 700 million light-years away, held almost no galaxies. Estimates of its size vary with where you draw the edge, but a common figure is 330 million light-years across. Our entire Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years across; you could line up more than three thousand of them inside the Boötes void.

A region that big should hold something like two thousand galaxies. It holds about sixty. It's been nicknamed the Great Void, and if you want to get away from it all, this is the place.

A Star of One's Own

So imagine a star out there, all by itself in the middle of the Great Void, with a planet, and on the planet, life. Talk about privacy. Its night sky would be completely black. Its philosophers would grow up believing, the way ours did before Hubble, that their little system was the whole universe.

However, that can't happen. A star that formed out there, far from any galaxy, would have to be made of the same stuff the universe started with: hydrogen, helium, and a pinch of lithium. Everything heavier—the carbon in our bodies, the oxygen we breathe, the silicon and iron of the ground under our feet—was cooked inside earlier generations of stars and scattered when they exploded. A lone star in a void would be a first-generation star, with no earlier generation to borrow from. Its planets, if it had any, would be balls of hydrogen and helium, with no rock, no water, and no chemistry worth mentioning. Any "life" it had would be gaseous, and probably not very interesting, which would make their building a telescope difficult.

Nor could a star from a proper galaxy wander out there later. Some stars do get flung out of their galaxies; the fastest one known is moving at more than a thousand miles a second. Even at that speed, coasting a hundred million light-years into a void would take longer than the universe has existed.

The Loneliest Galaxy

So if not a star, then a whole galaxy. And those do exist. The Great Void's sixty or so galaxies aren't scattered at random. Many of them lie along a thin tube running through the void, probably the leftover wall between smaller voids that merged into one, the way soap bubbles pop into a bigger bubble.

The loneliest galaxy we know of is in a different void. It's a barred spiral called MCG+01-02-015, about 290 million light-years away in the constellation Pisces, and it sits near the center of its void with no known neighbors for about 100 million light-years in any direction. According to the European Space Agency, if the Milky Way were that isolated, we wouldn't have known other galaxies existed until the 1960s.

Did it vacuum up everything around it? No. The voids began as places that were just slightly thinner than average in the early universe. Gravity pulled their matter outward, toward the denser regions around them, and the thin places got thinner, the way a stadium parking lot empties toward the exits. The galaxies left in the voids are the stragglers: mostly small, rich in gas, still forming stars, and growing slowly, because there's nothing nearby to feed on or collide with.

Are We There Yet?

Suppose you wanted to go there. You'd need a faster ride than anything NASA has on the drawing board, so let's borrow from Star Trek.

In the Star Trek universe, starships travel faster than light by "warping" the space around them, and their speed is given as a "warp factor". In the original 1960s series, the formula was simple: cube the warp factor (2 × 2 × 2, for instance) and that's how many times the speed of light you're going. Warp 1 is the speed of light. Warp 2 is 8 times the speed of light; warp 3, 27 times; warp 6, 216 times.

When The Next Generation came along in 1987, the writers redrew the scale so that warp 10 became infinite speed; a ship at warp 10 would be everywhere in the universe at once. Below 10, the numbers crowd together as they approach the limit. Warp 9 is about 1,500 times light speed, warp 9.9 about 3,000, and warp 9.99 nearly 8,000. That's why the later captains fuss over decimal points.

Here's how long the trip would take, both across the Great Void and just from the loneliest galaxy's nearest neighbor to the galaxy itself:

Even at warp 9.99, crossing the Great Void takes about 42,000 years, eight times the length of recorded history. Push it to warp 9.9999 and you could make the crossing in about 1,650 years: leave while Rome still had an emperor, and you'd be pulling in about now. Pack a lunch.

For the Extroverts

On the other hand, maybe you're one of those extroverts who actually want to be around people. (I'm told they exist.) Good news: the Sun's neighborhood may be quiet, but it isn't empty. The nearest house on the block is the Alpha Centauri system.

Alpha Centauri is the brightest star in the southern constellation Centaurus, and the third-brightest star in our night sky. Its light takes 4.3 years to get here. That sounds close until you do the arithmetic: 4.3 light-years is about 25 trillion miles. Voyager 1, the fastest spacecraft now leaving the solar system, would need about 75,000 years to get there, if it were headed that way, which it isn't. At warp speed it's another story. Kirk, at warp 5, would get there in under two weeks. Picard, at warp 9, would make it in about a day, roughly the time it takes to drive from Phoenix to Seattle.

Right next to Alpha Centauri in the sky is Beta Centauri. Together they're called the Pointers, because they point the way to the Southern Cross. For years it was believed they were partners, the two suns of a double star. But they aren't. Beta Centauri is about 360 light-years away, and is not one, but a trio of hot blue stars, the brightest of which is tens of thousands of times as luminous as our Sun. That's how it manages to look like Alpha's twin from so far away.

Adam Strange Was Right, Sort Of

When I was a kid, most of what I knew about Alpha Centauri came from DC Comics. Starting in 1958, an archaeologist named Adam Strange was regularly snatched off the Earth by a "zeta beam" and deposited on Rann, a planet of the Alpha Centauri system, where he'd save the day before the beam wore off and dropped him back home. (I loved those stories enough to write one of my own in 1975.) The comics made a point of telling us that Alpha Centauri was a triple star system, and Rann had three suns.

The comics were right. Alpha Centauri is a triple. But the three aren't Alpha, Beta, and Proxima. The two bright ones are Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B—a yellow star a little bigger than our Sun and an orange one a little smaller—circling each other every eighty years. They're too close together to separate without a telescope, so they look like a single star. The third member is Proxima Centauri, a dim red dwarf that is actually the nearest star to us, at 4.25 light-years.

Here's the "wrong reason" part. In 1958, nobody could prove Proxima belonged to the family. It travels across the sky in step with A and B, so astronomers assumed it was a member, but it's so far from the other two—about 13,000 times the Earth's distance from the Sun—that it could have been a stranger passing through. Proof that it's actually in orbit around them, on a path that takes more than half a million years to complete, didn't arrive until 2017. And from a planet circling A or B, Proxima wouldn't be a sun at all, just a faint red star, barely visible to the naked eye. Rann would have seen two suns. Right for the wrong reason, but in science fiction, that still counts.

Downtown

If Alpha Centauri still sounds too quiet, there's always downtown. The center of the Milky Way, 26,000 light-years from here, is where the crowds are. At the very middle sits Sagittarius A*, a black hole four million times as massive as the Sun, and packed around it is a swarm of stars millions of times more crowded than our neighborhood. Instead of four light-years, your nearest neighbor might be a light-week or two away.

Night would never really fall. The combined light of all those close neighbors would outshine our full moon many times over; you could read a newspaper at midnight, if anybody still printed newspapers. Isaac Asimov put Trantor, capital of his Galactic Empire, near the center of the galaxy, and it makes sense. That's where the trade routes are short. It would be a merchant's paradise.

It would also be hard on the skin. The black hole at the center flares in X-rays about once a day. The region is crowded with young, massive stars pouring out ultraviolet light, and massive stars don't live long; they die as supernovae, spraying radiation for light-years around. I picture Core merchants as a leathery, blotchy lot, squinting out from under wide-brimmed hats, who gave up worrying about their complexions a long time ago.

Back to the Drawing Board

Me, I'm glad I like being alone, because I have work to do. My novel The Abode of Angels takes place on the home world of the M'nar, the third planet of what I thought was Beta Centauri, Alpha's "twin sun". You see the problem.

My first thought was to move the M'nar into a Tatooine-style orbit around both A and B. Planets like that are real; the Kepler space telescope found several circling two suns at once. But those suns are practically touching. In the Kepler-16 system, the two stars are less than a quarter of the Earth-Sun distance apart. Alpha Centauri A and B swing between 11 and 36 times that distance from each other, from about Saturn's distance from our Sun to beyond Neptune's. A planet circling both would need to stay about twice as far out as Pluto just to have a stable orbit, and out there it would be colder than Pluto.

So the M'nar will circle Alpha Centauri B alone, close in, where the orange sun keeps things comfortable. Orbits like that are stable, and they come with a bonus: Alpha Centauri A. From the M'nar's world, A would be a second sun, a dazzling point of light somewhere between 500 and 5,000 times as bright as our full moon, depending on where the two stars are in their eighty-year dance. For part of each M'nar year, A would ride the night sky, and the nights would be more like twilight.

Real astronomy keeps nudging the novel, too. In 2025, astronomers announced that the James Webb Space Telescope may have photographed a gas giant about the mass of Saturn orbiting Alpha Centauri A, in that star's habitable zone. As I write this, it's still only a candidate. A gas giant is no place for life even remotely like ours to live; but gas giants can have moons, and moons can have air…

So that's the job: a new orbit, a second sun, and every scene that mentions either one to rewrite. I'll be at my desk for a while, with Finley and Lilly for company and occasional visits from grandkids who also live here, and nobody else, which suits me fine.

A science fiction writer's work is never done.

Because science is never done.