Paprika the spice or Paprika the film?
Given that space smells like burnt steak? Probably paprika, making it competition for the grossest candy ever.
What always rubbed me the wrong way about this factoid-oid is that it seems to go by volume instead of mass. Most of space is devoid of classic smellable things, only leaving spallated residue that is invariably going to smell like dust or ash (gunpowder is a frequent comparison).
But what if you go by mass instead?
After excluding the two big categories you can't smell (frozen rocks and nuclear explosions) you're basically left with atmospheres and interstellar gas clouds. According to my very scientific source, the vast majority of those is things you can't smell either: hydrogen, noble gases, nitrogen, carbon oxides, etc.
The few things you can smell are: ammonium, methane, phosphines, acetylene and acetylene-ish things, various sulphides and cyanides. (Caveat on the later : Hydrogen sulfide is known to temporarily shut down your ability to smell at all, and only about half of people have the genes to actually smell cyanide.) So after cursory research, the most common smells in space would technically be:
- Cleaning chemicals
- Farts
- Rot
- Very deadly almonds
So very gross candy indeed.
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