Our world is literally skating on thin ice - get used to the feeling

Thinking back over the perils of a long life, I recall many near-death experiences. All in all my continued survival is a tad, well, miraculous. Odd for an atheist. Thanks, God.

Melting icebergs in Antarctica provide a metaphor for life.

Near-death experiences, or NDEs, come in many forms according to those who’ve technically expired and returned to tell the tale.

Some “died” on the operating table and recall an OBE. No, not some posthumous award of the Order of the British Empire but an “out-of-body experience” where they floated above and looked down on their corpse. Many recall a luminous, perhaps angelic figure beckoning them towards a shining light. And then there was Kerry Packer, who famously carked it briefly while playing polo. Upon his return to this mortal coil, Kerry told me: “There’s nothing on the other side. No one’s waiting to judge us.” And he added with an ominous snarl: “So you can do whatever you f..king well like.”

“So for you it’s business as usual,” I observed.

Phillip Adams on his NDEs (near-death experiences) and what its taught him about life.

Another friend who returned from a brief encounter with the grave was ABC veteran Robyn Williams, restored to life by the urgent intervention of our colleague Dr Norman Swan. Robyn’s response? No report of spiritual ecstasy – and certainly no snarl of cynicism. Just simple gratitude.

As I felt when my partner Patrice saved my life after botched surgery. Fortunately she was with me in ICU when I started flat-lining.

Thinking back over the perils of a long life, I recall the following. Being tear-gassed in Tokyo during a demo that resulted in four fatalities, various close encounters with angry and deadly snakes, and being beaten up in Prague by locals who mistook me for a hated Muscovite. This latter bruising was ironic as just days previously I’d been arrested by police in Moscow in another case of mistaken identity.

Other near misses include surviving a crash-landing in a light aircraft, and missing a scheduled flight that crashed. Add in a ten-round fight with cancer, plus a few car accidents – plus all those that almost happened. All in all my continued survival is a tad, well, miraculous. Odd for an atheist. Thanks, God.

You too have must have had your moments, medical or motorised. Which should serve to remind us that even on the best of days we’re skating on the thinnest of ice, its cracks widening to take us into the depths.

There are, as we know thanks to the legendary wisdom of George W. Bush’s defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, “the known knowns, the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns”, or something like that. Ask the dinosaurs who didn’t know what was coming. Or to coin a phrase, “didn’t know what hit them”. And nor, 66 million years on, do we. Humanity could get clobbered into extinction at any time in the game of cosmic billiards.

And we’re having collective NDEs with A) the possibility of a second Trump presidency; B) the growing probability of nuclear war; and C) the dead certainty of climate change. Oh, I almost forgot another apocalyptic threat: AI.

For millions the NDE of war isn’t simply N. From the Ukraine to the Middle East, it’s not asteroids they need to fear, or a new pandemic. The experience of the NDE is here and now. We live in a world that’s skating on thin ice – and as with the poles and the glaciers, the ice is melting. “There’s nothing on the other side ... no one’s waiting to judge us,” Kerry said. But we can’t do what we effing well like.