The missing Titanic tourist sub is total nightmare fuel, provoking our deepest fears about a loss of control. It also reveals humanity's capability for holding out hope.

• The missing Titan submersible and search for its five passengers have captured the world's attention.
• A psychology expert told Insider that incidents like the Titan's disappearance play on people's anxieties.

The Titan submersible disaster currently capturing the world's attention is the latest in a long line of seemingly tragic human catastrophes that perfectly prey on people's deepest anxieties — and propensity for hope.

Search and rescue efforts are still underway after a tourist submersible carrying five people went missing on Sunday while on a dive mission to explore the wreck of the Titanic 12,500 feet beneath the sea.

The clock is ticking for the five passengers onboard the small vessel who likely only have enough oxygen to last them until Thursday afternoon, according to coast guard officials.

Each revelation about the conditions possibly faced by the five missing men adds new nightmare fuel to the fire: Passengers are bolted into the 9-foot-tall, 8-foot-wide metal tube from the outside in and are forced to sit cross-legged due to space constraints; each person typically brings only enough food and water to last them the length of the day trip, and the vessel is equipped with only a makeshift toilet and small curtain for privacy; experts have warned that temperatures in the sub could be quite cold as the Titan sits in near-freezing waters; and the sub has only one small porthole to peer out.

As time ticks on, public interest in the terrifying event is ramping up.

"There's a fascination about people who are in circumstances that are completely beyond their control," Lawrence A. Palinkas, a professor of Social Policy and Health at USC, told Insider.

Curious "looky-loos," as Palinkas described onlookers of cinematic news events, have long flocked to tales of human triumph or tragedy, such as the 2010 Chilean mining accident and the 2018 cave rescue of a Thai youth soccer team.

"I think why people become so obsessed with stories like this in particular, is that it reflects that fear of a complete loss of control and a complete lack of hope," Palinkas said.

Anxiety, he said, typically represents a fear of losing control over one's own circumstances, and the mystifying Titan disappearance is an "extreme example" of such a fear.

Since the vessel lost contact with its mothership on Sunday, approximately one hour and 45 minutes into its descent, marine experts and former Navy officials have posited the possible reasons behind the 23,000-pound Titan's disappearance, as well as the likely bleak outcomes for those on board.

But these experts' best estimations represent only educated guesses. The truth of the Titan's fate remains entirely unknown.

People can't help but imagine themselves on that sub

The lack of easy answers combined with human nature's natural obsession with events like this can cause the mind to come up with its own ideas, Palinkas said.

"What little information people have regarding the lost submersible is so small that people are forced to find an explanation on their own," he said.

Being trapped in a claustrophobic tube in the depths of the ocean is an undoubtedly terrifying situation — and a hyper-specific one — that few would ever find themselves in. But that doesn't mean we can't imagine the horror from the safety of our own homes.

"The likelihood that somebody will pay whatever amount of money to be in a submersible to visit the Titanic is pretty slim," Palinkas said, invoking the $250,000 price tag attached to the trip. "Nevertheless, it does…impel people to think about their own vulnerabilities."

"It may put people into a more existential circumstance of having to contemplate how one would react to a situation like that," he added.

When the terror is taking place far away and affecting unknown people, the general public can safely "consider the consequences of situations that are beyond" our control.

One of the natural ways humans process these feelings of fear is through social interaction and connectedness, Palinkas said.

"Rather than sitting by yourself and watching the story on the news, having an opportunity to talk about it with others and express your concerns in a non-threatening environment is probably the best thing anyone can do under these circumstances," Palinkas said.

And indeed a surge of tweets and TikToks have flooded social media since the Titan's disappearance on Sunday as ordinary people consider the terrors of being stuck at the bottom of the ocean with no room to move and no way out.

Regardless of how the Titan's tale ultimately ends, its disappearance is the kind of seemingly futile disaster that nevertheless propels people to hang on to hope until the very end.

"Everything is not entirely lost until it is," Palinkas said. "And we've been living in a phase of history where hope is a very rare commodity for many people."

"Over the centuries, people have always held out hope for survival of those who were presumably in hopeless situations," he added. "It's part of our social fabric and part of what makes us human."

After all, all 33 Chilean miners were safely rescued from their ostensible cavernous death sentence thirteen years ago; 13 boys returned to their homes in Thailand after weeks in a flooded cave.

"A lot of the fascination, I think, is the desire to see a positive outcome as much as it is the fear of an outcome that is not," Palinkas said.