With some rounding and averages, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population_estimates

1910 -> 1.7 billons

1987 -> 5.0 billons (2.9x)

2002 -> 6.2 billons (3.6X)

2006 -> 6.5 billons (3.8X)

So the 1987 case is still worse after adjusting for the global population.

It is, but not nearly as much; after adjustment, it looks pretty close.

Titanic made headlines because it was rich upper class people on board.

Coupled with the absurdity of a situation where the ship sinks slowly and people drown due to lack of lifeboats (among other things).

It was also supposedly unsinkable.

And the largest for its time.

Which leads to my other favorite modern myth that we never built a bigger ship than Titanic since that disaster. It's interesting to point out that very few modern Cruise Ships are smaller than the Titanic.

It reminds me a bit of the Challenger disaster, which was probably the biggest news headline of my childhood. 7 people died. More people die in a typical mass shooting, but we remember Challenger because it was a really big deal with the first civilian in space, and so everyone was watching the launch and had it blow up in front of them. It's likely that people care about the Titanic because it was supposedly "unsinkable" - if it had been the Carpathia that went down with 1500 people, it might've made headlines for a couple days but we wouldn't be talking about it 106 years later.

Hell, I didn't hear about Doña Paz until today, despite being the largest peacetime maritime disaster in history and happening just 2 years after Challenger.

I suspect a big part of the tragedy of the Challenger was a breaking of the "futuristic utopia" myth that many had in their minds at the time. A lot of it has disappeared in the last 20 years (or at least moved over to the singularity/AI myth), but back then things like the L5 Society [1] were popular, and you couldn't read Popular Mechanics without some sort of story about moon/mars bases.

In short, people wanted to believe that we could just go into space and leave all the problems we had and mistakes we made on earth behind. It was a sort-of "salvation". The Challenger was a poignant reminder that this was not the case.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Space_Society

Or Titanic's sister ship Britannic which was larger, thou was never uses as a passenger liner, due to sinking during service in WW1

I wonder if the punishment for murder ought to decrease as world population increases.

Not the punishment, but to make the analogy more precise: society's "interest" in individual murders does decrease proportionally with its own size.

In a village, a murder is the talk of town. In a city, we don't even know.

So, yes; GPs point, while cold and calculating in the way only actuaries can sometimes be, was a fair point nonetheless.

Well, but (by the same metric) the punishment is already reduced. If you execute someone for murder today, you're only executing 1/7.7B of total population.

(I agree, it's kinda silly metric.)

No. For the victim it's still a 100% loss.

And the victim's loved ones.

What if you murder someone that everybody hates, and who in turn hated everybody?

It's hard to argue the world wouldn't be a better place, but I think it's hard to know where to draw the line. It's all fine until you're in the minority, then I can't imagine you'd want people killing someone you like and respect even if they're nearly universally despised. It's a slippery slope probably best avoided.

Those are the murders that the police frequently don't expend a lot of effort in investigating.

There's actually a lot of murders that never get solved.

The damages from murder aren’t calculated relative against population count.

I think that was his point. It was a subtle jab at the GP's comment of using global population as a benchmark for the severity of a sinking ship.

But it's a thought provoking question because the impact to society is.

(from a purely; sociopathic standpoint anyway)

Perhaps it should instead increase as the average lifespan increases.

Which would imply that the punishment for killing a child should be more severe than the punishment for killing an old man. And that killing a cancer patient shouldn't be punished as harshly as killing a healthy person.

There is definitely a good argument there. A child has far more potential years of life left than an elderly person, so killing them seems worse. Perhaps that's one reason why we tend to think so badly of child murderers.

Of course, in reality (at least the American judicial system), punishment is usually based more on other factors, such as motive. So premeditatedly killing an old man because you wanted to steal his stuff is punished more than killing a child purely by accident.

FWIW, I don't really believe that the punishment should increase with increased lifespan, I was just giving a contradictory example based on different numbers.