Independent (not lab-commissioned) contemporaneous analysis of RHIC strangelet/vacuum-decay risk, published alongside the BNL-commissioned Busza et al. review. Argues that cosmic rays have been producing, via collisions with the Moon and other astronomical bodies, conditions at least as extreme as RHIC for billions of years, giving “a safe and stringent upper bound on the risk” from these experiments. Focuses mainly on strangelets rather than black holes (black-hole production wasn’t yet a live concern in 1999, pre-TeV-scale-gravity popularization), but is the paper LSAG/CERN-2003-001 cite as the second pillar of the cosmic-ray argument alongside Busza et al. relevance_note: independent corroboration of the cosmic-ray safety argument that both official reports rely on; useful for checking whether the “official” verdict is one voice or several converging ones.