The phrase "a distant idea" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe a concept or thought that feels remote or not easily attainable.
Example: "The notion of traveling to Mars remains a distant idea for most people, but advancements in technology may bring it closer to reality."
Alternatives: "a far-off concept" or "a remote thought".
"For most players in Europe, the idea of winning the Stanley Cup is only a distant idea.
But for some of New York's younger residents, those 18 to 24, who were born long after the city's first gay pride parade in 1970, and for whom marriage is a distant idea, does the legalization of same-sex marriage matter?
Will Kemp took the poetry prize with Driving to Work at 5am Listening to Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, while Michael Allen won the essay prize with an examination of the ways Keats treats beauty, A Distant Idea of Proximity.
It was in the late 1990s when nobody was thinking about cloud computing and the notion of software on the internet was a distant idea.
"The beauty of family," he wrote, was "once a distant idea".
But no matter what Medium blog posts tell you how crucial it is to understand the problem before coding its solution, this is, at best, an annoying part of an average developer's job, and, more likely, a distant idea that is happily ignored.
The distant idea that in a few years we may be able to kill teleconferencing as we know it and look someone in the eyes as we chat has been replaced by the idea of us being able to do (and create) almost anything together in a purely digital space.
Two scientists who were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday helped lay the foundation for regenerative medicine, the hotly pursued though still distant idea of rebuilding the body with tissues generated from its own cells.
The defendant, however, replied that he had "not the most distant idea of selling his wife, who was, poor creature, at home with her hungry children, while he was endeavouring to earn a bit of bread for them by the strength of his lungs".
Thus, our results are congruent with the ideas that creativity is associated with the integration of conceptually distant ideas held in different brain domains and architectures and that creativity is supported by diverse high-level cognitive functions, particularly those of the frontal lobe.
We always had this idea of perspective — there was always going to be a distant ice field.
