Is such a structure possible? If so, how short can its recovery time be?

How good can the resolution of how specifically it detects the locations of the gliders be?

We know that GoL is Turing complete, and if the field is initialized with random noise, then for any fixed finite pattern, as the board size goes to infinity, the probability that that pattern appears somewhere in the noise approaches 1. (of course, I'm talking about enormous board sizes, possibly with many many more cells than there are protons in the visible universe, not talking about anything resembling practicality.) If intelligence and agency is computable (which, it seems like it should be), "any fixed finite pattern" would include structures which, for some amount of time, before they are destroyed by surrounding noise, would simulate an intelligent agent.

If there are structures which, when surrounded by stuff initialized with noise, has a high probability of being able to withstand this noise, and then proceed to clear out the noise in order to e.g. make copy of itself, or just to grow, then we would expect the fraction of an infinite board containing such patterns (or things derived from them) to grow over time.

But, whether such structures can exist in GoL, in part depends, I think, on whether any large structures can withstand noise (or, having a high chance of withstanding it).

(I am defining "structures" in a way where a structure is allowed to include as part of it a large empty region (of any fixed size) on its periphery. This should assist in withstanding the noise, because it limits what things the core part of the structure could be faced with, to things which can travel a distance)