Yup, it doesn't take a very big starting pattern to produce likely infinite novelty -- though it's not always easy to prove that any given pattern won't eventually unexpectedly "go boring" due to some kind of unexpected feedback effect.

Life being Turing complete, it's also not difficult to build a pattern with an unknown fate -- like a Fermat-prime calculator that will stop growing if it ever finds a sixth Fermat prime, or the Collatz-sequence simulator described here:

https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Fate#Unknown_fate