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Thank you so much for your reply and encouragements!!!

If panspermia is cosmic seeding, who or what are the seeders?

Exactly. Just like the intelligent design hypothesis does not stipulate the designer, the panspermia/cosmic ancestry hypothesis does not stipulate the seeder.

It could be God, "Gaia", intelligent beings putting "seeds" on probes capable of surviving space travel (or as we did when we accidentally put bacteria on the moon), some emergent (or fractal) intelligence that itself achieves velocity of matter (which carries the capability of emergence) in order to escape the gravity of its origin and protect itself in space travel.

The concept is not far afield of exogenesis, the difference is in the properties - "engineering" for emergence on the receiving end.

I understand that scientists today are considering something like this to continue life elsewhere in the cosmos as our own sun cannot survive forever.

The panspermia hypothesis doesn't stipulate a seeder because it does not specify intentional seeding. The panspermia hypothesis is as follows:

Panspermia: a hypothesis that the seeds of life are prevalent throughout the universe, and furthermore that life on Earth began by such seeds landing on Earth and propagating.

Cosmic ancestry is (properly) defined by Wikipedia as follows.

Cosmic ancestry: An extreme form of panspermia [that] states [i]ntelligent life is neither the product of supernatural creation nor was it spontaneously generation through abiogenesis (the Origin of Life) but has always existed in the universe. Simply, intelligent life comes only from pre-existing intelligent life forms.

I will absolutely reject any effort to conflate the two or to equate panspermia with cosmic ancestry alone. Cosmic ancestry is an extreme subset of panspermia, but panspermia of its own accord makes a far different (and narrower) statement. I am open to a modified definition of "cosmic ancestry" other than that of Brig Klyce who originated the concept.

Moreover, I see no need to force any of the other definitions to conform with the definition of "intelligent design" that we have settled as follows.

Intelligent Design: A hypothesis that given features of actuality are explained by an intelligent cause, rather than by an undirected process such as natural selection.

Each definition is its own discrete endeavor. They will be compared and contrasted at the proper juncture.

And, I should say that the "panspermia" definition is given as follows.

Panspermia: A hypothesis that the seeds of life are prevalent throughout the universe, and furthermore that life on Earth began by such seeds landing on Earth and propagating.

We are debating whether there's any reason to deviate from that or if we can move onward to "collective consciousness" as our next definition.