Two sea tragedies reveal much about how we value human lives

Have you heard about the billionaire and multimillionaires who were trapped - and killed on a submersible after spending up to $250,000 each to view the wreckage of the Titanic?

- Arwa Mahdawi

Of course you have. The story was headline news in anglophone countries last week after the vessel, named the Titan, went missing. Enormous resources were deployed to try to recover the passengers. Every tiny development has been exhaustively covered. Millions of people, myself included, were glued to the live blogs and rolling coverage. And millions of people, myself included, are now newly minted experts on the difference between a submersible and a submarine.

It's completely natural to have been glued to the Titan story because, obviously, it was one hell of a story. Yes, the circumstances were unfathomably awful but, also, they were so unfathomably awful that they seemed unreal. The company that made the submersible is called OceanGate: it's as if it was named in preparation for a massive controversy. And it appears to have cut a lot of corners in its quest to build things quickly without regard to boring old safety regulations. The story seems almost too ludicrous to be true. It seems absurd that people paid obscene amounts of money to get into something that might as well have been called Tiny Little Death Trap.

While it was only natural to be glued to the Titan story, it was far from the only maritime tragedy in recent weeks. And yet it absorbed a disproportionate amount of the world's attention, empathy and resources.