Earlier quoted context omitted.
A few hints from the article: 810 sq miles mapped, a three year project and lidar flying by helicopter. Another giveaway is the search for MH370. In some dimensions Earth is still huge!
I wonder how much city life biases us to think the planet is smaller than it is. Perhaps it explains fears of overpopulation.
In a straight line, it’s smaller than we might expect: People can (and do) walk across continents, sail across oceans in one-person boats, fly all the way around in 2 days, visit every country at least once during their life, etc.
But of course the surface is two-dimensional, we can’t see very far at a time. The land surface is about 150 million square kilometers. (For reference, New York’s Central Park is about 3.4 square kilometers.)
It’s also “fractal”, in the sense that as we look at smaller and smaller pieces, we keep noticing more and more details. Every little patch of soil is teeming with tiny animals, plants, fungi, and bacteria.
Or if you like, there are probably at least 10 million restaurants in the world (maybe an order of magnitude more, it’s hard to guess). If you eat at 3 different restaurants every day for your whole life, it will take more than 100 lifetimes to eat at all of them. Then there are the 150 million books to read. Etc.