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That's true, but that's a 'half life' like situation. Start with a large enough initial colony and there will be enough time to mutate for some individuals to develop a new bag of tricks. At some initial fragment size (say, a good chunk of a planet) you might end up with something that can make it to the next star system and still be viable in some way.

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We're talking about spores, no? Spores do not evolve.

Spores have to get to the point where they can be spores. So the organisms that give rise to the spores do evolve. And technically spores are still alive (they are single cells, just better protected than normal cells and they don't perform any reproductive activity while in their spore state).

A big chunk of a planet hitting another planet would melt and sterilize both of them during the collision.

A BIG CHUNK turns into a range of manageable pieces over a star system. The bigger the chunk, the higher the probability of a piece existing that is both large enough needed to harbour microbial life and not so big as to melt and sterilise other planets.

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