No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter.
War of the Worlds?
"Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes -
and slowly and surely they drew their plans against us."
What you did there. I see it.
Could MArs have been a Moon around a large water world called Tiamat and when Tiamat came apart (for what reason I would only guess at using Sumerian mythology) The Moon was dashed with the debris and tilted 180 degrees, thus one hemisphere is scowered and the other cratered heavily. Some of the impact craters on our Moon might help with the issue, since debris from Tiamat would not just collect in an astoid belt but be tossed across the solar system.
Guessing is all any of us can do until soil samples are scrutinized from Mars.