The 100th anniversary of the sinking of the RMS Titanic looms before us, bringing with it a flotilla of commemorative coverage of what is already the most obsessively scrutinized maritime disaster in history.

Our fascination is driven by a perfect storm of factors surrounding a sinking that occurred on a clear night and a calm sea. Among them:

It was the maiden voyage of the largest, most luxurious ship then yet built. The loss of life was staggering — 1,517 people died on April 15, 1912, including some of the world’s richest and most influential people. The pride and self-confidence behind the “unsinkable” ship were overweening, down to the fact that there were far more passengers than lifeboat seats.

Beyond that, it was a stark reminder of the limits of technology in the face of nature.

One iceberg, an outsize chunk of frozen water, had destroyed the engineering marvel of the age, sending it 2½ miles to the ocean floor, where it sat unfound for nearly three-quarters of a century.

That is the stuff of myth and metaphor. And it is the anchor of our obsession.

“The human element continues to live on in this, and the disaster was just this terrible comedy of errors, both man-made and natural,” says Mark Gumbinger, a Wisconsin-based documentary filmmaker specializing in maritime subjects. “We’re still talking about it, and we’ll be talking about it 200 years from now.”

Gumbinger, who has made films about the Titanic and the Edmund Fitzgerald, the doomed Great Lakes freighter lost in 1975, listed a string of human errors in the Titanic disaster: the original 64 lifeboats reduced to 16 to save space, the shipbuilders’ decision to use cheaper rivets, the press for a transatlantic speed record despite iceberg warnings, misplaced binoculars in the Titanic’s crow’s nest on a moonless night.

Simple bad luck was also a factor. The Titanic’s launch was set back six weeks because of repairs needed on its sister ship, the Olympic. Without that delay, icebergs would likely not have been in the Titanic’s shipping lane.

The Titanic’s sinking, and the snuffing and altering of so many lives, has triggered any number of intriguing “what-ifs.” Think of it as a waterborne butterfly effect.

Consider: If mining heir Benjamin Guggenheim had not gone down with the ship, his daughter Peggy would likely not have inherited $2.5 million on her 21st birthday in 1919. Without that, she would have been unable to underwrite future art masters such as Jackson Pollock, Max Ernst, Man Ray and Paul Klee. Would the midcentury cultural landscape have been altered?

(In any event, we would have one less symbol for disasters fueled by hubris.)

Other disasters have since occurred that resulted from the collision of human pride with nature’s caprice. Some have even changed national policy, as the Titanic sinking changed maritime law regarding safety measures.

The 1930s Dust Bowl was largely the result of agriculture policy that allowed farmers to plow under the wild grasses that historically anchored the soil in Oklahoma, Texas and southeast Colorado. Drought came, then sustained winds, and an entire region and livelihood were laid to waste.

Vast California metropolises have been built along the San Andreas Fault, despite assurances from seismologists that a devastating earthquake is merely a matter of time. The 1994 Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles exposed inadequacies in building codes.

More recently, the 2011 tsunami in Japan that killed thousands and crippled a nuclear power plant also showed how nature trumps human ambition. History has yet to tell just how far-reaching the implications will be.

The Titanic disaster happened before the age of social media. There were no iPhones to transmit photos, footage and goodbyes from the dying ship. Just a few frantic SOS transmissions from the ship’s wireless room.

All that we have are the accounts of survivors, and the subsequent reconstruction of events based on examining the riven hull and shattered keel of the ship on the seabed.

Part of our fascination with the Titanic lies in the human psyche’s ability to wrestle with the scale of a calamity — and our cultural proximity to it. As Americans, we read stories about natural disasters in far parts of the world — 240,000 killed in the 1976 Tangshan earthquake in China, or 139,000 drowned in Bangladesh flooding in 1991 — and shake our heads. So ungraspable and far away.

But a space shuttle goes down, and some experts will tell you it’s about a 1-in-100 chance on any mission, and the images are seared into the national memory. So intimate and near. They were us.

This connection is part of why we remain captivated by the Titanic a century later. In the North Atlantic’s vast expanse, a luxury ship on its maiden voyage crosses paths with an iceberg in a placid sea. Less than three hours later, it shears in half and slips beneath the water.

Gone.

Except in a legend that has already outlived the last survivor.

William Porter: 303-954-1877 or wporter@denverpost.com