Wait wait wait, are we talking about *human *ghosts? They all die off in a few hundred years. But *robot *ghosts will continue to live for ever. Not sure about ghost ships or ghost animals though.
Ghosts die when Bigfoot eats them. 
Evil! Is that how you teach children to cover their mouths when they yawn?
No stealing single socks from the dryer? If a ghost would completely discorporate a sock, it would liberate enough energy to allow it to live for . . . hmmm . . .
Let’s see, E (Joules) = 0.028 kg (sock) X 300,000 km/sec X 300,000 km/sec = 25,200,000,000 Joules.
If one Joule is 0.000239006 Kilocalories, that’s 6,022,951.2 Kcal. Assume 2,000 Kcal/day needed to live and that’s about 3,011 1/2 days or about 8 1/2 years. More if ghosts burn less energy than humans do.
Rounding to one sock every ten years is tempting, but I think we need to take the engineering perspective and assume a ghost needs one sock every five years.
That’s a safety factor of 1.7.
Absolutely not!!!
It’s been scientifically proven that socks are the larval form of coat hangers. For every sock that goes missing in your dryer a coat hanger appears in your closet.
You can’t argue with science!
What about extension cords? I remember one house that we lived in, where we didn’t seem to be able to keep an extension cord available to save our lives. Then we moved. As more and more things were packed away, we discovered dozens of coat hangers in odd places, true, BUT we also discovered more than a dozen extension cords. I know we had never bought that many cords, so they were obviously both disappearing AND multiplying.
Are they part of your hypothetical cycle, or are they doing their own mystic thing? Also, MY theory is more scientific than yours because it’s got more math. [citation - C. Northcote Parkinson]
You’re very lucky that the Powers That Be have forbidden me to do my Etheric Psychologist shtick. Instead of talking earnestly about Non Corporeal Consciousness Fields and Metaconsciousness, I’ll just share the true* story of a ghost in my appartment.
At first it was just little things- a door opened, strange streaks on the mirror, whispers in the night. Then, I saw him. He was old- ancient. He had long white hair and a huge scar on his neck. He looked oddly familiar. He vanished before I could react. Of course, he came back. I would wake up and find him standing by the bed, muttering in Russian and Yiddish. I didn’t know what, if anything, to do. One day he showed me something. He lifted his bathrobe to reveal a birthmark on his shoulder. The world shook. I have that birthmark. That wizened face was my own. Apparently, at some point in the future, my experiments in time travel succeed. I die and return to haunt myself. Also, I learn fluent Rusian and Yiddish.
*By “true” I mean false.
Shouldn’t the speed of light unit be in meters per second to get joules? So 0.028kg * (9e16 m[sup]2[/sup]s[sup]-2[/sup]), or 2.52e15, or 2,520,000,000,000,000 joules?
I had ghosts in my garden this past summer. They were peppers.
I ate 2 right out of hand one day, I thought I would be a ghost before I got that taste off my tongue.
And I would have stayed dead and ghostly for a long time. At least 100 years. I have peeps to haunt.
Peeps of Easters and Halloweens past haunt me to this day.
Watch out for the white ones, they are evil demons!
First, let me assure you there’s nothing hypothetical about my statement above.
As for extension cords it’s been suggested, but never proven, that they are capable of existing in an ‘out of phase’ (for lack of a better term) reality. Not interdimensional mind you, just out of phase. This is thought to be primarily due to their bipolar nature. That’s bipolar in the chemical sense not the psychiatric sense, obviously. Hopefully you were able to thoroughly document your experience
You may have me on the math bit, I’m working on it.
That same phenomenon occurs to flashlights around here. Come to think of it we lose alot of Yeti cups. Socks, wash cloths, dog toys, remotes, phone chargers, bic lighters, chocolate bars ( nix that; I ate them). I think I live where there is a doorway to a paranormal world. Or maybe my house is on a Indian burial ground. Aaccckkk!!!
Just my luck!
Link.
Thanks for the correction.
That’s 602,295,120,000 kcal. 301,147,560 days. And I divided for years incorrectly before, so it’s 825,062 years.
Dang. No wonder they’re after our socks. I wonder if they’re risking burning themselves out when they connect with such a strong power source.
And since reversing the variables also returns a result of “true” - half as long as twice a ghost - we can now consider the equation proven.
You write the paper.
Nice!
Of course we can do scientific research on the subject of ghosts, and such research has been carried out many times over the years.
And guess what the result of that research was?
If you have malicious Fey, they’re worse than anything. Befriend? Sure. But by the legends and stories, we’re just playthings to the Fey. We’d be like talking puppies to a group of sociopathic serial killers with no conscience, no compassion, no remorse.
I wouldn’t want anything to do with them.