Suppose you want to make a globe with outrageously high resolution. Maybe you want to map every street in the world, or every car. How much space do you need?
The Earth is almost exactly 40 000 000 meters around (the small error in this number is due to long-ago measurement mistakes), and to see every street, you need no worse than, say, 15-meter resolution — which you can get from, say, Landsat. OpenStreetMap may be a more interesting data source.
40 million divided by 15 gives you 2⅔ million pixels around your globe. If you're using a regular 600dpi laser printer, your globe is 370 feet in circumference, or 18 meters in radius, 36 in diameter. Your globe will be about 14 stories tall.
To reduce that to a single story tall, you'd need to reduce the size by 16×, to 9600dpi. At this resolution, your pixels are only 2.6 microns wide: within the range of what you can see with a light microscope, but not easily.
However, 9600dpi is somewhat difficult to achieve. 2400dpi is supposedly achievable on high-end inkjet printers, and you might be able to use photographic reduction processes to reduce them 4:1.