To convert that figure to a more relatable number: the surface area of the Earth is just about 197 million square miles. With such an error I'm having a hard time trusting the article content.

Technically, if you're measuring surface area, it' important to remember that the earth is not a sphere. There's a bit of a paradox measuring shorelines: the shorter your ruler, the longer it gets, because you're able to capture more complex features. Pethaps the authors took an extremely precise measurement of the surface of Estonia, counting everything down to the sinus cavities of dogs sleeping in alleys...

Area isn’t notably affected by fractal boundaries. Only perimeter is.

Can you explain this more? It seems trivial to extrude a 2d coastline along a third dimension to produce a paradoxical areal calculation corresponding precisely to the perimeter paradox...

If you extrude a coastline into a wall the wall's surface area will blow up the same way the measured perimeter does, but that;s because you've turned a boundary-length problem into the area of a different object. It still doesn't mean the country's ordinary map area becomes paradoxical, the extra boundary detail only affects a vanishingly thin strip near the edge, so the enclosed 2D area stays well behaved.

Aha, so you've misunderstood my joke entirely. We agree about the math, please reread my original comment with the understanding that I'm insinuating that the article has deviated from "ordinary map area" and is instead measuring the fractal surface area contained within Estonia's perimeter.

[now that the joke is explained, feel free to laugh]

Common enough error in the US when dealing with square meters abbreviated to sq m. Only off but a factor of 2.6 million.

But yes, it does call into question the rest of the fact checking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonia Area • Total 45,335 km2 (17,504 sq mi)

Some people are just oblivious to six orders of magnitude mistakes, and then go off about "folly, mistake, calamitous hubris, neglect, and plain stupidity" ...

Assuming this is about Harju, it seems the author read "245 million sq m" and assumed the m was miles, not metres.

So the already large 24,500 hectare farm became a ludicrous 245 million square mile multi-planetary behemoth.

Reading sq m as square miles is a surprisingly common error in the US, but usually gets caught before production or publication because the result is orders of magnitude out.

Quoted straight from the piece, as written by dude who just made one of the smallest countries around have abandoned farms larger than the whole world ...

But many people are really like this, no notion whatsoever of order of magnitude plausibility. Has to be beaten out of engineering students, but I suppose the majority of the population is untreated.

(LLMs are going to be a lot of fun too)

I mean it's sort of hard to believe anything they say.