What would Ghostbusters be like in Real Life?

With a new Ghostbusters movie coming out spearheaded by Jason Reitman with Paul Rudd and some of those almost not kids anymore people from Stranger Things the franchise is finally showing some life so it’s time to take a look at what Ghostbusters would look like in real life.

A big part of the allure of the original was that it felt real but there are some difficult to notice violations of the laws of nature. While I’m not entirely sure as to what a proton pack would contain, it turns out that you can make a partical accelerator with common household items. Even if the Ghostbusters proton packs use some sort of radioactive power source it’s still possible and actually happens more often than you’d think or wish. Whether someone just walks into an old uranium mine and snaps a brick off the wall, scavenges the stuff from common household devices, or someone misplaces a tablet of caesium chloride the world is wrot with stories of the mishandling of radioactive material therefore it would be possible that 4 tech savvy New Yorker’s could build a portable “nuclear accelerator”.

Despite what some people think, ghosts do not exist at least not on the level they do in Ghostbusters. Most modern day ghost encounters don’t have a ghost appearing in corporal form but instead as a noise, image, or event that people can’t readily identify so for this examination of the film we will be using the descriptions of how the Ghostbusters equipment works to determine the physics in the dimension they will be encountering.

The first gizmo we will be looking at will be the proton packs. The proton streams wouldn’t look like they do on the big screen. Real world proton beams are way more linear very similar to focused flashlight beams instead of those squiggly things. Proton beams are a real world thing in fact MIT even built a model proton pack that would hypothetically be how a real one would look for the pained 2016 reboot. Since they are more like flashlight beams instead of the cartoonish spaghetti noodles usually seen, it is more likely that they push or burn the ghosts and could be used to coral them into a location where the trap could be dispatched.

There wasn’t much discussion as to how the traps and containment system operate but it seems to reason that if they are using concentrated proton beams to corner the ghosts then a neutron beam would probably attract and trap the ghosts. Proton beams aren’t nuclear which goes against Peter Veinkman’s description of the device so it would make sense that he was actually talking about the ghost traps. Which of course would also mean that the traps and containment system would be some sort of nuclear reactor so if the government were to actually shut off the Containment Grid all willy nilly then they would likely cause a nuclear meltdown in the heart of New York City causing the complete evacuation of one of the most heavily populated and famous cities on earth which is why I think that situation would be handled more professionally from the EPA than it is in the movie. They wouldn’t just ignore them and shut it off. They would listen to Egon and call in CBRN experts to help them safely disassemble and transport the device.

There’s no such thing as full protonic reversal, or at least not like eluded to in the movie. If the Ghostbusters are using proton beams to corral these ghosts then the action of crossing the streams would initiate what is called a non-elastic reaction. What that means is that the beams would become weaker rather than incinerate your entire reality. This would pose a major problem for the Ghostbusters as that’s how they beat Gozer at the end of the movie, they cross the streams while in Gozer’s dimension and collapse his reality. The idea that people scrambling to coral in a child sized monster wouldn’t accidentally cross their beams once in a while is ridiculous. The Ghostbusters would have accidentally collapsed their own reality in on itself at least five times before the end of the movie.

I think the solution to the Gozar problem in a more realistic world would be to tamper with the cooling system on a trap forcing the miniature nuclear reactor inside to detonate. Since these paranormal beings have the unusual characteristic of being drawn to such reactions it is likely that the Ghostbusters would be crushed to death in a gruesome radioactive black hole as all the ghosts in New York are drawn toward (not necessarily into as some would be too far away to make it) the explosion. I’m mainly talking about the giant man made out of marshmallows and ectoplasm that would be no doubt getting lit up by the police and National Guard at that point. Said explosion would leave a permanent scar on the New York landscape that would look similar to a floating cracked mirror as the two dimensions would be stuck permanently reflecting off of each other. The blast and force of the impact of the Marshmallow Man would likely topple the entire building.

I know that for years it seemed like future Ghostbuster sequels would probably showcase the birth of a franchise but even if the real Ghostbusters didn’t die in a nuclear blast, their business model really wouldn’t have stood the test of time without Gozer. <play the dead have been rising from the grave clip>. If the level of paranormal activity drops back down to the levels that it is in the world you and I live in, then where is the need for the Ghostbusters? How many ghosts did you see today? Most people probably answered none and given the Ghostbuster’s price tag... <$5000 clip> and that whole aforementioned radioactive problem that their real world equipment would have... I mean yeah you got rid of the ghost but you also made the whole neighborhood inhabitable for the next 50 years. As showcased on September 11th 2001, the government would then be all over this one and it wouldn’t be like the crap you’ve seen on Men In Black where Tommy Lee Jones starts neutralizing everyone. Congress would bombast the governments National Security Agency for not knowing about Gozer. A paranormal division would immediately sprout up in most major Militaries.

While the four Ghostbusters would be hailed as heroes the New York incident would be treated like a horrible failure in public services. After the investigation into what happened finished. Cities all over the world would search for buildings constructed in a similar manner to Dana Barret’s apartment complex and if they found any they would be ordered destroyed. Sinister plans like those of Vego DeCarpathian would likely go bust before they even get a chance to start as people would start taking such situations more seriously at least that would be the case in most of the major countries.

The Death of Egon we never received.

Eventually another Gozer-like problem would sprout up in a lesser developed country but the sacrifice of Egon, Ray, Peter, and Winston would leave the international community well prepared.

Slimer being busted by a realistic Ghostbuster.