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What's your argument here? Why is it ridiculous?
Because earth has vastly better natural resources. It would be like trying to build an empire in Antarctica or the Sahara. At least those have air!
With Mars, the environment is completely inhospitable to humans, there's no soil to grow food, no air to breathe, no nothing. To even set up a research station there would be a big achievement, to make that self-sustaining would be an incredible advancement. But you're skipping the research station, skipping the colony, skipping the independent state, and going straight to empire without solving any of the problems in between. How are you even going to feed or provide oxygen to a Martian empire?
America was full of vast, untapped natural resources, and it still took nearly 200 years to become a superpower, after European powers devastated each other.
like i could go write a very long article here about how to do things, but i think that would miss the point. we'll simply wait and see what happens, though i suspect it could take at least 100 years.
I guess I just don't understand what possible advantage Mars has over places like the Sahara. And you don't seem to think that an empire is going to suddenly manifest in the Sahara.
Mars is not at all that inhospitable as you seem to think. It has all the resources: sunlight, CO2, water. There's really not much more needed. The reason why Mars is a desert today is because life just never happened to have developed there, but if it had, it would be as inhabited as any fertile land is.
Just food and air.
Fertile? Martian land is not fertile. It is incredibly barren. Even if you somehow solved the atmosphere problem, you couldn't grow things there.
Only earth has the soil needed to grow things. Eons of things dying and being processed by worms has transformed wide swaths of the planet into fertile soil filled with nutrients that plants can draw on. Martian land has none of that. It's just rock and dust. Even the Sahara is more hospitable.
Processing Martian soil to be even remotely "fertile" would be very energy intensive even if you brought it back to earth. "Terraforming" the soil on Mars at scale would require massive amounts of material from Earth. And then you have the problem that Martian gravity is too weak to retain a breathable atmosphere, even if you could magically conjure up a planet's worth of air.
Even if all of these problems could be solved, Mars has no oil since oil is also derived from life. What does it have beyond "sunlight, CO2, water?" Earth has all of that and so much more, in abundance.
I'm sorry but you simply don't understand geopolitics at all, nor the sheer scale of what you're imagining.