The Titanic struck an iceberg 100 years ago tonight, and sunk in the early hours of tomorrow, April 15.

This has fascinated me since I was a child and reading those little 16-volume encyclopedia sets that U.S. supermarkets sold for $1 per volume, if you bought enough groceries.

And unlike many of my historical fascinations, this one seems to be broadly embraced. Almost universal. Even The National, here in Abu Dhabi, has printed numerous stories about the 100th anniversary of the sinking, including this massive piece about how many Arabs may have been on board.

Nearly everyone is drawn in by the Titanic story.

Why is that?

Here are my guesses, in the order they bang into my brain, which I suppose makes this a list.

1. The “unsinkable” part of it. The Titanic was supposed to represent a batch of technological breakthroughs, one of them being its alleged inability to sink. We feel the futility and arrogance of “man versus nature,” and the former believing he can beat the latter, issues we continue to deal with a century later.

2. The high number of dead, just over 1,500 … but particularly because a bit more than 700 people survived. That’s almost one in three. Who lived, and why? Who made those decisions and how sensible were they?

3. More arrogance: Enough lifeboats to carry only about half of the people on board.

4. The number of famous and wealthy people on board, including John Jacob Astor, an American millionaire, back when a million was a lot of dollars. And the luxury of the upper decks of the ship.

5. The number of “little” people on board, most of them going to America in search of a better life, and most of them cruelly deprived of it.

6. The class-conscious system of organizing who got into the lifeboats. Few of the immigrants in steerage, particularly the men, survived.

7. All the little things that went wrong, like dominoes falling, with the resulting disaster. The nearby ship with its radio turned off that didn’t hear Titanic’s distress calls. The decision to speed through an iceberg-infested area in the early spring so that the ship would get to New York on time, or even early. The idea that “waterproof” compartments didn’t actually have to be sealed. And on and on.

8. What we perceive to be both heroism and cowardice during the 2.5-hour period from “hitting the berg” to “going under.” The men who followed the “women and children first” notion are among the former, as well as the ship’s band which, famously, played on … and J. Bruce Ismay, the chairman of the White Star Line, who saved himself, among the latter. And us naturally wondering: “How would I have acted?”

9. The attempts, for most of the century, to figure out what happened and why, questions not really answered until 1985, when the wreck was found on the seabed and eerie photos taken. We now are fairly sure that the boat went under bow-first, but when the boat became too vertical, it snapped in half and went down in two big pieces.

10. The valuables that went down with the ship.

11. All the media attempts to portray what happened, most recently James Cameron’s hugely successful 1997 film, Titanic.

12. And this one: Early in the 20th century, the West seems to have been an optimistic place, certainly from the eastern marches of the German Empire straight across to North America, riding breakthroughs in science and industry, with booming populations, and what appears to have been a nearly universal belief in “progess.” Things were going great, and they would get only better.

Titanic’s sinking put a lie to all those notions and foreshadowed a disaster far greater and destructive but perhaps a result of the same blind optimism and self-assurance: World War I.

The West has never been the same, since the Great War. And Titanic going down, on April 15, 1912, about two years from the war’s outbreak, now seems of a piece.