I'm puzzled by what appears to be a logical flaw in the argument. Here's what troubles me: If we use a simple regression as per the article to hypothesize a far earlier emergence of life, this takes us back to just a couple of billion years after our universe began, at which point there were scant ingredients necessary, so we're talking about a comparatively sparse precursor environment and so the odds seem proportionately less. But that's not the real problem. The real problem is that it seems odd to argue (a) that our planet hasn't had enough time to come up with current complexity from scratch, yet (b) argue that less complex (but nevertheless complex enough to be life) organisms did however arise within a startlingly short period of time, one far shorter than the age of the Earth, which is supposed to be too short to enable life to evolve locally. So on the one hand we have "the Earth is too young, at 4.5 billion years, to have engendered life from scratch here," and the contrary "life must have evolved a mere billion or so years after the Big Bang."

This argument seems to be trying to have things both ways. While panspermia may or may not be an interesting hypothesis, the core argument at least as related in this article appears to suffer from an inherent logical contradiction.