summary - Short Nature paper asking whether our vacuum is the true minimum-energy state or a metastable “false vacuum” that could tunnel to a lower-energy true vacuum, potentially destroying the observable universe if triggered. Notes that cosmic-ray collisions with the interstellar medium and Earth’s atmosphere have for billions of years reached center-of-mass energies far above anything terrestrial accelerators can produce, without triggering such a transition. Concludes that laboratory high-energy collisions are correspondingly not a meaningful additional vacuum-decay risk, since nature has already run a much larger number of much higher-energy trials.
relevance_note - The seminal statement of the cosmic-ray survival argument, applied here to vacuum decay - the template every later micro-black-hole and strangelet safety bound reuses; this is the one cosmic-ray-premise node for this slice, not to be multiplied.