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Stephen Hawking’s five stops for a virtual tour of the universe were the Big Bang, the Milky Way’s central black hole Sagittarius A*, the exoplanet Gliese 832 c, Saturn and Earth—especially Santa Barbara, California. They were his personal choices for the 2016 documentary Stephen Hawking’s Favorite Places, not an objective scientific ranking.
How Hawking chose the five stops
The premise came from a question posed to Hawking: “What if you could visit your five favorite places in the universe? What would they be?” The film’s executive producer, Ben Bowie, recalled that Hawking took time to type out an answer. The resulting itinerary moves between cosmic phenomena and places with personal meaning: the beginning of the universe, a black hole, a distant planet, Saturn and a California city Hawking loved. Bowie described the selection process and the film’s premise for The Guardian.
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Hawking’s five places in the universe
1. The Big Bang
The tour opens at the universe’s beginning. In GeekWire’s 2016 recap of the film, Hawking explains that the Big Bang was not the sort of explosive fireworks people might imagine: visible light did not exist for hundreds of thousands of years. The film then fast-forwards to a flash about 380,000 years after the beginning. That is the documentary’s account of the scene, rather than a claim that viewers are seeing the Big Bang itself. GeekWire’s recap describes the sequence.
2. Sagittarius A*
The second stop is Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. The documentary uses it to explore black-hole physics, including Hawking radiation and how Hawking’s own thinking about black-hole behavior changed over time. It is a destination for examining an idea, not a place the film presents as an ordinary visit. GeekWire’s 2016 account covers the black-hole segment.
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3. Gliese 832 c
Gliese 832 c is an exoplanet orbiting a red dwarf star. GeekWire’s 2016 report described it as a nearby candidate for habitability and gave its distance from the Solar System as 16 light-years. That wording reflects the period’s description; it does not establish that the planet is habitable or that life is present. In the documentary, Hawking connects the possibility of life elsewhere to the search for signals, while warning that humanity should be cautious about replying to one. The Guardian’s contemporaneous report quotes his caution about answering a signal.
4. Saturn
Saturn was Hawking’s favorite planet. Bowie said the choice reached back to a schoolchild’s question about which planet Hawking liked best. His answer was: “Saturn, because it is so beautiful.” The film also takes viewers near Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons. Bowie recounts the Saturn story in his account of the film.
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5. Earth, especially Santa Barbara
Earth is the final stop, with Santa Barbara, California, at its center. Bowie said Hawking insisted the city be included. Hawking had spent time there with his young family in 1974 and described it as “My home away from home … It was a world away from the gray skies of Cambridge.” He also praised the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara as “the perfect place for blue-sky thinking.” Bowie said Hawking considered Santa Barbara one of his favorite places on Earth, alongside Norfolk. GeekWire’s report gives the Santa Barbara context and quotations.
What the choices reveal—and what they do not
The stops span different kinds of fascination: the universe’s origin, black-hole physics, the possibility of life beyond Earth, planetary beauty and personal memory. That is a way to understand the variety of Hawking’s itinerary, not a ranking he supplied. The producer’s account links Saturn to a simple expression of beauty and Santa Barbara to a place that mattered in Hawking’s life; the other stops let the film explore large scientific questions.
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About the documentary
Stephen Hawking’s Favorite Places was reported in 2016 as a 25-minute virtual journey through the origins of the cosmos, the possibility of alien life, Hawking’s life and humanity’s place in the universe. GeekWire and The Guardian identified CuriosityStream as its platform at the time. Those historical reports do not establish whether the film is currently available there or on another service, or whether access varies by region. GeekWire’s 2016 coverage and The Guardian’s report describe the film and its then-reported platform.
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