While Life computers are generally not feasible, Life has many uses that might not be readily apparent. Its main use is to model complicated systems of interaction. For example, weather forecasts depend on many different principles each affecting other factors. Temperature, winds, and humidity are not all uniform across the sky and each individual part cannot be added into a formula to definitively come up with a weather forecast. The same principle applies to parts of an ecosystem: all of the components depend on all of the other components and cannot accurately be modeled separately.

In addition to modeling ecosystems, the Game of Life can also be used to model a living species over time. Assuming an infinite amount of combinations in Life, it would make intuitive sense that at least a few would be self replicating. Von Neumann showed in his introduction of cellular automata that this would be possible because a series of Life combinations can be set up to produce any other combination with the correct instructions. Thus, it could be programmed to produce itself, and to continue this process as long as the instructions (the Game of Life version of DNA) are passed on to the creation. Over time, those combinations would produce more of the same combinations and inevitably, "mutations" would result. For instance, a creature could run into a block or another still life that would alter its shape from its original form. Most of these mutations would result in the creature no longer being self-replicating and eventually dying off, but some should over time be beneficial, enabling creatures to reproduce better. Thus these beneficial mutations would dominate eventually until another beneficial mutation came along. By watching the Life structures evolve, one could witness the possibilities present in evolution and gain an idea of the beginning of life on Earth. Self-reproduction and successive improvement through mutation have wide-spread implications in Artificial Intelligence.

The possibilities for modeling systems using Life have only begun to be explored, leaving many directions in which the same ideas can be focused to produce further improvements. The simple and powerful model, similar in many ways to biological life itself, will have lasting implications to our current understanding of many currently unreachable phenomena.