We don't have to be special though. We can only exist at certain points in space time, under certain conditions. Those conditions are currently met, therfore we can exist, regardless of the infinite time/space conditions where we can't.

On your second point, that's what the science actually says. "Observer" or "observation" is used in a scientific sense and was probably a poor word choice. Science journalism gets carried away with anything that has the word "quantum" in it and it drives us mad.

You're absolutely right that the mechanism that's causing the wave function to collapse is the presence of whatever piece of equipment the particle is hitting. Whether that collapse happens at the two slits or the back wall changes the pattern, and that change is what shows wave-particle duality.

Also: physics doesn't claim to know that the Big Bang only happened once. That's just as far back as we can rewind with our current models. This is again something that science journalism takes a lot of liberty with.

I don't think a unique big bang has ever been the prevailing theory in science. If you ask science what happens before the big bang, the answer is "we don't know", and if you ask has there been other big bangs, you might get a "not that we've observed", but science has not attempted to explain what happened before the big bang because in the most literal sense, we just don't have the data to make an attempt.

Predictions do state that the future of the universe will look different from the beginning of the universe (by which I mean the universe since our big bang) and the maths suggest that before the big bang, we think there was a singularity of incredible density, but that doesn't really deal with how many other big bangs there can have been.