Some kind of time travel, or at least time scanning (Option 3) seems the best option.
William Poundstone's "The Recursive Universe" reports Conway's persuasive analysis of alive, intelligent Life patterns in Life. Conway thinks that alive patterns would emerge, survive, propagate and evolve in huge random fields with very low density (say one on cell per billion).
Love your subreddit (but I don’t like Reddit much and I almost never use it).