Because I'm an astronomer, but I'm not a planetary astronomer, so this is not my area of expertise. I know enough to identify the errors that I did, not do my own analysis. The HiRise pics were delayed bc of the shutdown, but Loeb says they're coming soon:
avi-loeb.medium.com/hirise-image...

He doesn't say anything about where he got it, just "Summing [mass flux] over an area of order 10 million-kilometer squared, yields a mass loss rate of..."

I can understand the logic behind his method (though I don't know if it's appropriate/accurate for comets), but the huge surface area that he's using doesn't make sense to me as anything but an upper limit bc of how massive it is.

I'm not sure exactly what he's doing because the only other reference I have for calculating mass loss is Jewitt et al. 2025, and he's diverging pretty heavily from that.

His answer is probably to imply something about jets being more efficient and ejecting material at a higher velocity, but unfavorable geometry + thick atmosphere + solar wind works just as well for me.

The other point about the tail supposedly taking 3 months to form, which Avi has danced around but hasn't actually said, is that it begs the question "if it takes 3 months to form at 'natural comet ejection speed', how did it appear so suddenly?"

I'm also interested in the photo he posted yesterday that focuses on the dust tail- I'll believe that's a physical anti-tail, but it's obviously significantly shorter.

He does multiply the mass flux over an area of 10 million-km^2 during that calculation though, which seems absurdly large to me. If the tail was as wide as it is long, by his estimate it should only have a cross-section of 0.785 M-km^2, by mine it's still only 7 M-km^2.

I didn't say much about the current anti-tail bc I'm still not sure if it's physical (he hasn't said much on this point), and while I'm an astronomer, I'm not a planetary astronomer, so I don't feel qualified to evaluate his density estimates which based on that.

I focused on the -S tail in the second point because I was trying to demonstrate that Avi wasn't applying the most basic comet knowledge to his work. Overall, my point is that he's making mistakes that don't even require significant experience with cometary astronomy.

Hi! I'm the author, but I'm trying not to dox myself bc people on the internet can be very... passionate when you point out that Avi made a mistake, so this is not my usual account.