4. A logarithmic version doesn’t look any less weird, because the distances between the “middle” milestones are tiny compared to both the stretches of time before and after these milestones. More fundamentally, I’m talking about how remarkable it is to be in the most important [small number] of years out of [big number] of years—that’s best displayed using a linear axis. It’s often the case that weird-looking charts look more reasonable with logarithmic axes, but in this case I think the chart looks weird because the situation is weird. Probably the least weird-looking version of this chart would have the x-axis be something like the logged distance from the year 2100, but that would be a heck of a premise for a chart—it would basically bake in my argument that this appears to be a very special time period.
4. A logarithmic version doesn’t look any less weird, because the distances between the “middle” milestones are tiny compared to both the stretches of time before and after these milestones. More fundamentally, I’m talking about how remarkable it is to be in the most important [small number] of years out of [big number] of years—that’s best displayed using a linear axis. It’s often the case that weird-looking charts look more reasonable with logarithmic axes, but in this case I think the chart looks weird because the situation is weird. Probably the least weird-looking version of this chart would have the x-axis be something like the logged distance from the year 2100, but that would be a heck of a premise for a chart—it would basically bake in my argument that this appears to be a very special time period.