The first of the four necessary conditions for a strangelet disaster. Status per the paper: model calculations (bag-model with perturbative QCD) cannot settle it — stability seems unlikely but not impossible, requiring bag-constant values below traditionally favored ones because gluon-exchange interactions in quark matter are on average repulsive; hypernuclei (one or few s quarks) are heavier, not lighter, than their nonstrange counterparts; strange matter may still exist pressure-stabilized in neutron-star cores regardless of the zero-pressure question, where a quark core would rapidly equilibrate to strange matter and burn outward non-explosively.