My earliest exposure to this concept as a child was watching the film Jurassic Park. As someone fascinated by systems I found the idea of having to bring the whole system back up from scratch pretty interesting.
Today I still find these kinds of bootstrapping processes fascinating - both these megascale processes, but also the boot process that occurs whenever you turn on your computer. The latter is probably one of the most Rube Goldbergian feats of engineering with us today that actually still achieves a useful purpose. In fact it's absurd how Rube Goldbergian it is. And the complexity of the boot processes for modern systems (see [1] for a small glimpse) is extraordinary.
When you turn on your computer, it's like you're re-executing the entire process of a civilization bringing itself into being, gradually developing progressively more sophisticated technologies: at first RAM isn't working, but then you get RAM working and that lets you get progressively more sophisticated parts of the hardware working, etc.
By comparison, humans have no "automatic boot process". We're constructed in the 'on' state via fork(). So this repetition of entire process of, ah, 'abiogenesis' whenever you turn on your computer is kind of insane by comparison. Entire kingdoms of hardware state rise and fall with the press of a power button.
As an aside, I'm fond of the Red Dwarf novels, which are set on a massive mothership-type spaceship. The ship was constructed in space and never designed to enter a planet's atmosphere. In particular, the ship, and its engines, was constructed in the 'on' state by the crew that built it originally. It was never conceived that the ship would ever need to be rebooted, because it was assumed once the engines were initially fired during the commissioning of the ship, they would never be turned off until decommissioning. Thus, the ship has no automatic boot process for the engines, only a manual engine firing procedure which is extraordinarily arduous and long-winded and takes weeks to execute, said procedure having been included in the manual only as a curiosity more than anything else. This idea of a ship built "on" under the assumption it would never once be shut down or "restarted" until decommissioning is interesting, but of course also directly mirrors biological life.