His ranch was 20 miles away from the nearest neighbor.

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People often lived far away from their nearest neighbor.

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Mr. Scharf makes vivid the mind-boggling nature of the universe by noting, for instance, that the space between a star like the sun and its nearest neighbor is 30 million times the diameter of the sun itself and that there are 10 billion stars in the universe for every human being who has ever walked the Earth.

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But he didn't reckon on the inexorable pull of gravity from Earth's nearest celestial neighbor.

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Alpha Centauri, our nearest stellar neighbor, is four light years away.

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