OP learn about cellular automata
Within the study of cellular automata is the potential to answer every single one of your questions. Personally I have found most of the answers I asked myself, I could tell you, but it wouldnt be worth much more than any religious wisdom that is already out there. That is, I cant prove it to you any better, not here and now at least.
I really care that more people study cellular automata because they will likely find the same answers and in doing so collectively can find ways to do science on it to prove them. A lot is sorta self evident stuff that I dont think will be difficult to prove, its just a matter of someone taking the time to do it. Im doing this myself but theres a lot of low hanging fruit as far as this goes and I think it would be better for everyone the quicker that gets picked.
Start with researching into conways game of life. Get familiar with the dynamics of it. Then make sure youre familiar with chaos math. You dont have to rigourous to reach the answers, but you ought to be rigourous if you want to prove them to others. Then watch Wolframs a new kind of science. Then play with the rules and get familiar with them. Then learn to make your own from scratch, this is extremely important actually, you should have some coding experience. If not, learn Python and maybe you can do just some basic stuff and that could be enough. You have to experience creating it all from scratch though so you create a deeper understanding of whats going on. Even if you read about every step, you wont have the same understanding as actually having to think through how to get the computer to actually do those steps. By now you should already have started to get answers to some questions you may have thought unanswerable, which will also give you direction for what to research next. At this point you are in the garden of low hanging fruit and could write a half assed paper on any of the stuff youre now aware of and you'll have done good.
