ghosts and the improbability of a full wipeout

[veronica-rich.livejournal.com]

This isn't slashy, I guess, per se (though we can get our slash out of canon, too, really - so choose your poison). But I need to distract myself from stuff going on IRL, so I thought I'd put to you all the questions I put to Nat this past weekend for fun.

Last week, I went on a city ghost walk; I like the history more than the ghost stories, and if you have a reputable guide, these are a good way to learn some of the more interesting elements of a local area's past. But I was thinking at one point as we were in transit between one locale and another - okay, let's assume for purposes of discussion there are such things as ghosts. (Let's also assume we're going to up-end Rob Grant's apple cart and drag the paranormal into Red Dwarf, instead of sticking strictly to sci-fi - or, hell, treat the paranormal as scientific in some way we can't yet explain well.) Thousands of people (in the book, there were over 11,000), most fairly young and prime, were killed instantly by the cadmium leak blast that precipitates the whole series. This are fact.

Let's assume an old saw about ghosts, that most hang around when they have unfinished business or died an unnatural or violent death (i.e., not of natural illness or old age - no time to get used to the idea). First of all, wouldn't there be a fair number of ghosts haunting Red Dwarf after the nuclear blast? If so, is there any way any of them could last three million years into our series "present" or would they all have long faded by then?

Second, and just a sub-tangent I put to Nat was, I find it very hard to believe that EVERY human was killed on that ship in the blast - they might not have been able to inbreed and survive long enough to see Lister come out of stasis, granted. But it's stated, again in the book, that Holly shut off a huge part of the lower decks to contain the blast - enough to protect Frankenstein and provide a pretty damn big "safe" area for an entire cat city and ten or so FLOORS of food and supplies to be worked through by them in that time. Are we really expected to believe there were no workers doing inventory or unloading, or rearranging, or stocking, or anything in those lower decks, out of 11,000 JMC employees on the same ship? So if any of those people survived, even if they don't manage to breed well enough to keep humans going until Lister's reanimation, they could've been haunted by those ghosts. Wouldn't there be some journals or recorded diaries or something, perhaps, to be found by Lister & Co.? (Perhaps there were so few their "lines" died off relatively early and Holly doesn't remember them - like he forgot other things. Hence a good reason we wouldn't have known about it.)

Third - if some ghosts could last three million years, is it possible Rimmer could be one of them? And what would holo-Rimmer do upon running into ghost-Rimmer? Or ghost-Kochanski? Ghost-anyone-you-want? I suppose there's some dark comedy to be had in Lister mistaking ghost-Rimmer somehow for holo-Rimmer.

Mods, if you think it's not relevant enough, let me know or take it down and I don't mind. Just seeing what others have to say.