The Lasting Lessons of John Conway’s Game of Life (2020)

The video at the top of the article seems to be a depiction of a computer made in Life that encodes Life.

Melanie Mitchell’s comment, early in the article, mentions that fact that you are sad to see no mention of.

There is one mention of it in one of the quotes.

> Melanie Mitchell — Professor of complexity, Santa Fe Institute

Given that Conway’s proof that the Game of Life can be made to simulate a Universal Computer — that is, it could be “programmed” to carry out any computation that a traditional computer can do — the extremely simple rules can give rise to the most complex and most unpredictable behavior possible

Yes, great stuff - his own site has some works you can tinker with, too[1], along with links to the source[2].

1: https://generated.space/sketch/ornament/ 2: https://github.com/kgolid/ornament

It's hard to make structures in CGoL that are robust to collisions. So if you randomly initialised the universe I suspect you would never get life, because any complex structure that did arise would crash into random junk and be destroyed as soon as it tried to move.