Experiments to start at the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in the fall of 1999 will study collisions between gold nuclei at unprecedented energies. The concern has been voiced that 'strangelets' -hypothetical products of this collisions- may trigger the destruction of our planet.
We study the extent to which naturally occurring relativistic heavy-ion collisions can be used to estimate the risk incurred in running the BNL experiments.
