IBM Ponder This #121 · May 2008

This month's puzzle is about Conway's Game of life.
The game is a cellular automaton on a grid where in each generation, every cell determines its state (dead or alive) based on its eight neighbors: a dead cell will change its state to alive if and only if exactly three of its neighbors are alive; A live cell will stay alive if and only if two or three of its neighbors are alive.
All the changes are done simultaneously.
Find a possible state of the universe whose next generation is depicted below.

Target grid from the archived IBM challenge; aqua means dead, blue means alive.

Aqua denote dead cells and blue denote alive cells.
Thanks to Dr. Yossi Elran for introducing the idea of Retro-Life.

Solution

Best opened after a real attempt

To be added.