Alaska was once a place that no one cared about. The weather is harsh and unforgiving. The landscape is difficult to traverse. Help is very, very far away. Getting here is expensive. Staying here is even more expensive. The area was claimed by Russia centuries ago, yet they sold it to the United States for peanuts at the first opportunity. The purchase of Alaska was considered at the time the most foolish waste of taxpayer resources imaginable. Then someone struck gold. Gold, being the most lucrative ore at the time, brought many fortune-seekers totally unaware of the conditions under which ore extraction would occur. Although the ore was abundant, getting to it, getting it, and getting it out even today often involves more risk than reward. While success was elusive for the individual, miners that pooled their resources and worked together fared much better, and some became quite prosperous. The secret to successful mining was innovative engineering. The University of Alaska started out as a school of mine engineering, and to this day it is a leader in the fields of mineral discovery and extraction. When I play or watch others play Space Engineers, I can't help thinking I'm experiencing Alaska's history all over again, in space. After all, if you live in Alaska you might as well be in outer space. If you're going to extract ore from here the effort and expense is nearly the same. Equipment built to work other places won't work here. Methods developed elsewhere won't work here. If you don't carefully consider the environment you are working in you will fail. Out here, failure means death. Sounds like space. My goal in playing and streaming Space Engineers is to promote the ideals of engineering, mining, and cooperative effort. I fear too many people are trying to turn it into another space battle game. I see so much more potential than that. There are many political, social and economic ramifications of mining asteroids that this game is perfect for exploring. There's so much we can all learn through participation. I hope you'll join me.

Global warming and climate change made us all kind of crazy towards the middle of the 21st century. Life just got harder. When life gets hard for rich people and rich nations, things tend to happen. Tensions between nations rose. Resources were hoarded, then fought over. National governments looked to space for answers. A multi-national effort to return to the moon proved to be a near disasterous failure. The return on investment was... short of expectations. All talk of going out further to Mars ceased. We had simply settled on fighting over what was left of Earth. One person, a mining engineer from Alaska, knew the potential of asteroid mining was far greater than anything one could get from the Moon. In an effort to prove his theory he designed a series of drones capable of finding asteroids, assessing them for mineral potential, and driving the best candidates back to lunar orbit for processing. After years of campaigning sufficient capital was raised to launch two "prospector drones". One drone was destroyed during the retrieval process. The two asteroid collided and nearly struck the Moon, but eventually ended up in a stable lunar orbit. The proportional return on investment turned out to be four times that of the Lunar effort, and sparked renewed interest in the Asteroid Belt. It was like every gold rush in history all lumped together into one effort, then doubled. Seemed like everyone tried to cobble together some kind of half-baked "spacecraft" so they could get to the Asteroid Belt and make their fortune. There were government efforts that, although relatively well-designed, were slow to materialize due to bureaucratic red tape and political infighting. Private enterprises appeared sooner but were much riskier. One such enterprise was North Star Exploration. Using material from the original Lunar Asteroid site, four brave individuals designed and built the equipment they needed to seek their fortune. This enterprise would eventually become the mining conglomerate known as Asteroid Mining & Modification.