The primary cause of eye damage due to looking at the Sun (solar retinopathy) is photochemical injury to the retina. This is where high energy photons (UVA, which is wavelengths of 315 - 400 nm) cause chemical changes in the retina and destroy it. It seems that major damage can be done after only a few minutes of looking at the Sun.
Sunlight, when it reaches Earth, has a power of 1366 W/m^2. The atmosphere absorbs some of this, so at the surface it's about 1100 W/m^3. Of this, about 3%, or 33 W/m^2, is UV. Since most of the UV band except UVA is heavily attenuated by the atmosphere, we'll go ahead and assume that the majority of that 33 W/m^2 is retina-damaging UVA.
The pupil of a human eye is about 3 mm in diameter when at its most narrow (giving an area of 7.1E-6 m^2), so the UVA power entering the eye is:
33W/m2∗7.1×10−6m2=233μW
If we assume that it takes 3 minutes of staring to do damage, then the energy the eye receives is:
233 microwatts * 3 minutes = 42 millijoules
What this says is: 42 millijoules is the maximum amount of UVA energy your eye can receive before damage is done.
Now. How do we define 'safe'? I'm going to pick a number out of the air and say that the Sun would be safe to look at if we could stare at it for 30 minutes; ten times our current limit.
So, if we want ten times the exposure time we need one tenth of the power reaching our eye. The power of sunlight is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the Sun. So if the power at 1 AU (the distance from the Earth to the Sun) is 1366 W/m^2, the power will be one-tenth of that at a distance of:
1012=3.16AU
That probably puts you somewhere in the vicinity of the asteroid belt.
However, if you wanted to sit on a planet to do your observing: The orbit of Mars is 2.12 AU and so, in theory, you should be able to sit on Mars and stare at the Sun for about 14 minutes with no ill effects.
If you go out to Jupiter (4.1 AU), the power is about one-seventeenth of the power on Earth. So you could stare at the Sun for just under an hour if you so desired (not really sure why you'd want to).
This is based on a lot of assumptions. But the message should be about right: if you want to stare at the Sun, you're best to go at least one planet further out, preferably two!