Is it possible that Mars was just like Earth at some time in the past? Could it have an an orbit similar to ours, and over the years drifted away(or forcibly driven away), too far from the Sun to sustain life/atmosphere/water? If the Earth drifted as from the Sun, I could imagine that it would evolve into a planet similar to how Mars is right now after a long period of time.
Something cause Mars to be in a present state.. That could have happened...
Not the sun... All of the ancient religions were astral at first and the name associations between pantheon gods and planets are primordial. A group of primitive people devising an astral religion from scratch today would invariably end up worshipping the sun and the moon, but the two chieftain gods of every one of those ancient religions were Jupiter and Saturn, particularly Saturn. Plato consistently refers to antediluvians as "children of Kronos (Saturn)", and Hesiod, Ovid, and others refer to a "golden age" prior to the flood when Kronos/Saturn was "king of heaven". In the same language, the sun is the king of heaven now. The ancients clearly believed that Saturn had been a small star which we, Mars, and Venus orbited, and that the present sun then captured that older system. Youtube searches on "thunderbolts project" turn up some of the details, as will also going over http://www.thunderbolts.info.
It's distance from the sun has nothing to do with not having an atmosphere, it does have one, very thin but still there. The reason it is thin is loss of the liquid core of mars, which in turn caused the loss of the magnetic field around the planet which allowed the solar winds to gradually strip the atmosphere away to the point it is today. The thin atmosphere allowed the water vapor to evaporate into space. If our core ever cools and solidifies, depriving earth of its magnetic field, earth will suffer the same fate.
Is it possible that Mars was just like Earth at some time in the past? Could it have an an orbit similar to ours, and over the years drifted away(or forcibly driven away), too far from the Sun to sustain life/atmosphere/water? If the Earth drifted as from the Sun, I could imagine that it would evolve into a planet similar to how Mars is right now after a long period of time.Not a chance. Mars has about 1/8th the mass of the Earth; what passes for an atmosphere on Mars has, at the surface, the same pressure as the Earth's at 40 *miles* altitude. Evidence of water is mixed -- there's water present under the surface, but no sign there were ever open seas (not surprising given the tenuous atmosphere). IMHO, all evidence for erosional events found to date conform to an impact model -- a chunka rock drops in; the energy released by the impact melts water under the surface; it goes from ice directly to vapor in the low pressure environment, in the process producing a temporary microclimate inside an all-vapor atmosphere; until it dissipates, the rest of the water is able to flow in liquid form. This explains the from-nowhere-to-nowhere erosional features and nothing else does. :')