I'm perfectly comfortable saying that I don't have an intuitive grasp of the conversion between nanometers, micrometers, and inches, which represent length according to different units, across different magnitudes, and especially in a context where I'm switching between talk of scales in terms of orders of magnitude and in terms of multiples (e.g. 100x is also just two orders of magnitude).

Honestly I find it kind of nuts to insist that knowing the difference in size ratio between a mitochondria and a mouse off the top of your head and to convert between them in different units is something the average person knows but whatever, maybe everyone knows that.

You're right that I was wrong about the glider but it's kind of a pennywise, pound foolish argument in this case if you think the upshot is supposed to be a blanket denial of cellular automata ever being reflected in nature. Off the top of my head I know the triforce repeating triangle pattern, perhaps the most famous cellular automata model, is found on seashells as one of many examples, so the point stands that we find in nature remarkable similarities to structures modeled in cellular automata.