I saw a city bus flashing a message along the lines of "stop the spread" / "wear a mask" along with the usual other stuff, and I just kind had a sense of unreality, as if I were dreaming about a science fiction movie or story that I'd seen. A frighteningly plausible plague or zombie movie. I mean, I'd gotten used to it, but then I suddenly flash back to the perspective of a year ago, or ten, or twenty.

An idea I had, which I will never use to write an SF novel, but anyone is welcome to steal, though it's kind of dumb and definitely not well grounded in science, is...suppose that humans are all the intelligence there is in the universe, and in the near future, something is going to wipe us out, maybe some kind of wibbly-wobbly quantum observer effect is making probabilities spread out and become fuzzier in advance, the closer we get to the event. I'm kind of imagining that the wave functions are all sort of un collapsing as we get closer to their being no observers.

As if there was an improbability generator a la Douglas Adams, but due to a purely natural effect of physics.