Will the Earth be destroyed by the collisions taking place at RHIC?

During the summer of 1999 a lot of controversy and discussions have taken place concerning the issue of, whether the high energy collisions at RHIC might initiate either a black hole, that would subsequently swallow the earth, or a small piece of "strange matter", that would grow and change all the material on the earth, thereby destroying all life.

Don't worry! Billions of collisions between heavy ions at energies even higher than the RHIC energies are taking place every second in the Universe (collisions between cosmic rays), and they have not had the negative consequences theorized by a few theorists. A detailed report on the issue has been made by group of distinguished physicists (Jaffe, Busza, Sandweiss and Wilczek) and an executive summary has been made by the director of Brookhaven National Laboratory, John Marburger. You can read more about this issue in the following collection of articles:

• "Big Bang machine could destroy Earth", The Sunday Times, July 18, 1999 (pdf, ps)

• "Will Brookhaven Destroy the Universe? Probably Not", New York Times, August 10, 1999 (pdf, ps)

• "The Big Bang Is Back", Newsweek, August, 1999 (page 1, 2, 3)

• "Strange Matter", Fox News, August 23, 1999 (pdf, ps)

• "Making the Stuff of the Big Bang", Voss, Science 285 (1999) 1194 (pdf, ps)

• "Atlas Shrugs", Fred Moody, ABC News, September 1999

• "Scare Stories and Mysteries of Quarky Behavior", Curt Suplee , Washington Post,
  Monday, September 13, 1999; Page A11 (pdf, ps)

• "Microcosmic Bang", Science News Online, September 21, 1996

• Ken and Soren in UT's science good news, September 22, 1999

• "Big debate over a ‘Little Big Bang’", Alan Boyle, MSNBC News, September 23, 1999

• "Apocalypse Two", More comments from ABC News (Fred Moody) (pdf)