Mars was a moon of Phaethon. When Phaethon blew up, it completely destroyed Mars and also damaged the Earth. There was a solar civilization in our solar system that inhabited the planets and moons of our goldilocks zone. The gods. There is evidence of mining operations on various other moons as well, including: Mimas, Ganymede, Titan, Epimetheus, and Janus. Venus and our current Moon were most likely moons of Phaethon as well, and both inhabited.
We are the lone survivors because we alone are the bread basket that survived the cataclysm relatively unscathed. The other settlements on Mars, Venus, Titan, our Moon, etc. were either too close to the cataclysm or were not self sustaining due to non conducive environments and were more like colonies dependent on their mother Phaethon.
The upper bounds for the size of Phaethon is 5.5 times the mass of Earth, this is: asteroid belt + Kuiper belt + Oort cloud. No mass at rest within our Sun's gravity well can truly escape its pull. So all the mass of Phaethon is still floating around our solar system as asteroids and comets and planetoids, etc.. Asteroid belt + Kuiper belt + Oort cloud is all that mass and it is equal to 5.5 Earth masses. That is the upper bound for the size of Phaethon.
If Mars was at a similar distance to Phaethon that our Moon is to us, Mars would have been hit with debris equivalent to 1.905 x 10^21 kg (comparative to asteroid belt or 4% of moon). That is 10,000 times more than the asteroid (Chicxulub) that wiped out the dinosaurs. If Phaethon had an equal distribution of water that Earth does, then along with that mass would have come 442,088 km^3 of water -- or 5 times all the water in the rivers and lakes of Earth.
So Mars is buried in mud. It must have been like an unimaginable mud/steam nuclear bombardment coupled with solar system wide thunderstorms as the friction of the debris discharged onto the Martian surface.
Earth, at such a distance from the orbit of Phaethon, would have been hit with at most 1.5366 x 10^15 – 1.8705 x 10^16 kg depending on which end of its orbit it was in relation to Phaethon, if the debris were pulverized completely and perfectly distributed on the expanding sphere from the cataclysm. That's about the size of Mount Everest and the same to 10 times smaller than Chicxulub.
Most likely it would have been a rain of small asteroids and particles that hit in many places over the surface of the Earth over the course of a few days. Exactly what the recent 12,800 years ago platinum impacts suggest brought us out of the Younger Dryas. Among that mass would have been about 4.34 km^3 of water which is quite small, an average hurricane drops 21 km^3 of water a day.
The Phaethon myth is widespread all over the planet and talks about the same event. A “blazing star” that takes the place of the Sun, who's journey is both different in direction and pace to the Sun and brightly inflames the firmament, is struck by lightning and falls to Earth, setting fire to the Earth. It is recorded in: Plato (Greeks) from Solon (Egypt), Mesopotamia (Babylon) (Tiamat), Near East, Mediterranean (Canaanites, Phoenicians), North America (All over - Pacific Northwest to Southwest and Central), South America (Mayans - Quiche), Pacific Islanders.
This shows humans on Earth witnessed the event and passed it down through the generations. This puts the upper bounds to the event to 350,000 years ago when anatomically modern humans are said to have begun walking the Earth and is also, most likely, the upper bound for homo sapiens language. The only evidence for strong cosmic bombardments on Earth within the last 350,000 years, is 12,800 years ago. Which places the destruction of Phaethon at 12,800 years ago.
I didn't want to come to that conclusion. This is where the numbers and evidence leads.
Some more thoughts: Most of the evidence for the Late Heavy Bombardment most likely comes from 12,800 ya, especially of the inner solar system. An anthropocentric view of our solar history is needed to explain all the anomalies in the solar system. The Moon (I believe a main mining outpost) was most likely close to the cataclysm and the survivors moved it into orbit around the Earth. 5.5 masses of Earth means higher gravity which equals stronger bones, which could indicate giants if removed from that gravity well. Venus, if a moon of Phaethon, would have been closer in orbit to Phaethon than Mars. It explains the relationship in myth between Mars and Venus which many researchers, including Velikovsky and the Electric Universe people highlight. It also explains why at a closer orbit it might have been ejected away from the cataclysm as the force was stronger closer to the epicenter. The cataclysm would also explain evidence of scarring on moons in the outer solar system that are locked with one face facing inward, like Iapetus. There are too many pieces of correlating data and evidence that point to the cataclysm.