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It's never faded from the world's imagination. 

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Our own correspondent, Zain Verjee, asked the man who discovered the Titanic wreckage why he is now on a mission.

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These are some of the last images captured of the Titanic until her wreck was discovered 73 years later on the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean.

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There's a knock on my cabin door, and it's 2:00 in the morning. I was, "That's odd." 

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And I come into the command center, a room about this size, 

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and just as I walked in, our robot went over a boiler of the Titanic.

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And we had the picture of that boiler hanging on the wall. And we went, "It's Titanic!" And we exploded. 

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I mean, we were... you know, the tension. We were down to the last couple days.

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And then, someone innocently looks at the clock and says, "She sinks in 20 minutes." 

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It was 2:00 in the morning; she sank at 2:20. 

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And that innocent comment, we were embarrassed that we were dancing and screaming and celebrating. There was nothing to celebrate.

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And it was like someone hit an emotional switch, and we just -- poof. 

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And we were very moved. It hit us, because we were at the spot.

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At the spot where 1,514 people lost their lives on a ship that was meant to be unsinkable. 

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For Ballard and his team, it was like stepping back in time.

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When we went down and we saw the human... where humans had landed. 

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That nailed us, because, you know, the Titanic hit the iceberg and it broke in half, 

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and this giant object, the largest moving object on the planet sinks violently, and everything comes raining.

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Well, the people who were still trying to survive are floating above it, 12,000 feet above it, 

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and the temperature's below freezing, and it finally gets the ones in the water. It takes about 25 minutes, the hypothermia. 

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And they just loose grips. And now, all these bodies start coming down. Hundreds and hundreds of bodies are now raining down, landing all over the ocean floor.

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Well, animals immediately find them and consume them, exposing their skeletons. 

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Well, the deep sea at those depths dissolves bones. It takes about five years to completely cause the skeleton to vanish. 

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But what's left behind are their shoes they're wearing.

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All over the Titanic are pairs of shoes. Not a single shoe, a pair of shoes. 

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And you'll see scenes... the one that knocked me away was a mother's shoes, next to her were her daughter's shoes.

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When we first found the Titanic, 

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we went in and made a beautiful mosaic of the whole bow section before people touched it. 

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We came back 20 years later and did it all over again, and we put them side by side, 

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and you can see the damage, not by Mother Nature, but by the submarines.

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They're right there. See those big, orange... ? 

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That's where the submarines have been landing, and you can see it's just... it's breaking down the deck, it's crushing it.

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By law, Ballard and his team could have claimed the Titanic as their own property, but they chose to leave it undisturbed. 

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Tourists and trophy hunters have not been as respectful. 

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The famed crow's nest from where the iceberg was spotted is among the victims of visitors.

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They're not doing it on purpose, but it's like a bull in a china closet. 

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And they turn and they hit things, and you can see every place they landed. 

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And the question is . . . is we don't mind you visiting it. But you don't go to the Louvre and stick your finger in the Mona Lisa. 

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So, there should be some sort of rules.

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And not just for the sake of the Titanic. 

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Ballard has gone on to discover countless other wrecks, including a 1500-year-old ship in the Black Sea.

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There's over a million -- think about this -- a million ancient shipwrecks yet to be discovered. Time capsules. 

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But there's no rules. It's like it's the biggest museum on the planet, but there's no lock on the door.

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So, the question to society, technology is a two-edged sword. It can cut both ways.

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Do we go through this new museum we're discovering to appreciate, or to plunder?