>>18234693I normally wouldn't comment on Tyson of all people, the guy frequently says dumb shit. In this case though that might even be true since we're talking about shrinking something down to 1/1,000,000,000,000th of its current size. The actual surface disturbances on Earth are somewhat large, but relative to the size of the planet itself they're trivial in size.
To put this into context you can get a topographically raised globe of the Earth which is the size of a basketball, and feel what it would be if it were that size, and already the raised portions are really not that easy to detect. If you then made this still smaller--would it be billiard ball smooth? Well, the height of Mt. Everest is about 4.5 miles, the width of the Earth is 8,000 miles (ish, on average as it is slightly oblong) and that means that Everest is 0.06875% the average diameter of Earth.
Could you detect a 0.06675% difference in the surface of a billiard ball just my touching it? Because assuming a 2" billiard ball that's one 50,000th of an inch. The tiniest most minute chip you could see in the ball would still be a hundred times that size. You'd need a micrometer to even measure it
