and other man-made colliders for billions of years, without any harm to the Solar System, were among the most striking arguments that these hypotheses were unfounded. The other main controversial issue was a demand by critics for physicists to reasonably exclude the probability for such a catastrophic scenario. Physicists are unable to demonstrate experimental and astrophysical constraints of zero probability of catastrophic events, nor that tomorrow Earth will be struck with a "doomsday" cosmic ray (they can only calculate an upper limit for the likelihood). The result would be the same destructive scenarios described above, although obviously not caused by humans. According to this argument of upper limits, RHIC would still modify the chance for the Earth's survival by an infinitesimal amount. Concerns were raised in connection with the RHIC particle accelerator, both in the media and in the popular science media. The risk of a doomsday scenario was indicated by Martin Rees, with respect to the RHIC, as being at least a 1 in 50,000,000 chance. With regards to the production of strangelets, Frank Close, professor of physics at the University of Oxford, indicates that "the chance of this happening is like you winning the major prize on the lottery 3 weeks in succession; the problem is that people believe it is possible to win the lottery 3 weeks in succession." After detailed studies, scientists reached such conclusions as "beyond reasonable doubt, heavy-ion experiments at RHIC will not endanger our planet" and that there is "powerful empirical evidence against the possibility of dangerous strangelet production". The debate started in 1999 with an exchange of letters in Scientific American between Walter L. Wagner and F. Wilczek, in response to a previous article by M. Mukerjee. The media attention unfolded with an article in UK Sunday Times of July 18, 1999, by J. Leake, closely followed by articles in the U.S. media. The controversy mostly ended with the report of a committee convened by the director of Brookhaven National Laboratory, J. H. Marburger, ostensibly ruling out the catastrophic scenarios depicted. However, the report left open the possibility that relativistic cosmic ray impact products might behave differently while transiting earth compared to "at rest" RHIC products; and the possibility that the qualitative difference between high-E proton collisions with earth or the moon might be different than gold on gold collisions at the RHIC. Wagner tried subsequently to stop full-energy collision at RHIC