Laughable. What would they fight over? I love sci-fi too, but let's be realistic. If Musk succeeds, and I believe he will, it will still be quite a long time,

Laughable. What would they fight over? I love sci-fi too, but let's be realistic. If Musk succeeds, and I believe he will, it will still be quite a long time, possibly hundreds of years, before there's any notable population on Mars beyond a single city. They won't have any resources we don't have here, aside from Martian tourist trinkets, and the cost of getting resources from Mars to Earth would defeat any potential profit anyone could make. Musk has said this more than once. In scifi, this plot flaw is usually undone by having the alien planet possess a resource that can't be found or made anywhere else, like Avatar's unobtainium or Dune's Melange. But in the real world, that's not a thing. If we're not fighting over resources, then what? So what if the Martian colonists declare independence? Independence from who, anyway? "Earth"? Because it won't be an extension of any existing country, it won't just be "US territory on Mars." It'll be its own entity, with inhabitants from a variety of the countries on Earth. And it's not like Earth is going to be demanding "tribute" from it, that makes no sense on any level. In Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress," the Earth demands grain shipments from the Moon to feed its overgrown population. But....is that likely, really? Are we really likely to be dependent on grain shipments from Mars? It's a fun scenario, but I doubt it. It seems more likely to me that they'll find ways to scale grain production with existing land, as they have done for decades and continue to do today.