Can a human colony survive on a 'hot' world?

Question

A colony ship headed for its new home countless light-years from Earth suffers an unfortunate malfunction on the final part of its descent phase and crashes onto the planet. Thankfully, the ship crashes near its intended landing zone which is ideal in terms of fresh water/arable land. The ship impacts, knocking out almost all of the most advanced equipment for good, reducing the colonists to a close to modern (2019) level of technology, but with very limited initial availability. Very few of the population actually died as a result of the crash, but are now scattered across the surrounding countryside along the flight path (approx 100 miles) due to being evacuated via escape pod just in time, with the crew being the worst off, having sacrificed many of their lives to save the ship.

As the colonists emerge, they discover that their intel was completely accurate: Prior scans before the journey began indicated the planet is for all intents and purposes considered to be an ideal world, just like Earth, but with different flora/fauna, etc. However, the scans missed a minor detail. Everything is just a little hot. Spicy hot.

All types of plants and creatures seem to contain some heat, with the lowest being in the hundreds of thousands of Scoville units, with the most potent sources in the tens of millions or more (Feel free to adjust this range if necessary). A certain concentration even permeates the very air they breathe. The colonists are simply a random sampling of a normal population. This isn't the first colonization mankind has embarked on, and anyone can sign up at this point. Besides, this world was "supposed to be a cakewalk" provided the ship had landed intact. Unfortunately for them, outside help is likely to be at best, decades away if it comes at all.

So the question is, can the colony, take the heat?

And what would their society/culture look like when the rest of humanity comes to check up on them?

Answer 1

The colonists will rapidly be desensitized to capsaicin.

This assumes that the "spicy hot" on this world is capsaicin (the active molecule in hot peppers) or something that works similarly. There are other spices perceived by us as "hot" including those in horseradish, black pepper etc. Each has a different mechanism.

As regards capsaicin: this molecule initially stimulates and then exhausts pain nerves.

Capsaicin: Physicochemical properties, cutaneous reactions and potential applications in painful and inflammatory conditions

Capsaicin and its related vanilloids have a complex action on primary sensory neurons with major role in physiology of pain by detection of high threshold to physical and noxious chemical stimuli, as the first step in producing the pain session (1). Initially, capsaicin induces their activation, characterized by a local burning and stinging sensation, possibly associated with hyperalgesia and allodynia after exposure to heat and mechanical stimuli... In case of subsequent or prolonged applications of capsaicin, initial excitation is followed by loss of responsiveness, known as desensitization of nociceptive neurons, which stands at the base of analgesic/anti-nociceptive effect of topical application of capsaicin. Low-concentration topical creams, gels, lotions... with capsaicin were developed to ‘defunctionalize’ cutaneous nociceptors and treat painful conditions. Moreover, capsaicin further depletes the neuropeptides from the sensory nerve endings and reduces the initial inflammatory response. Capsaicin can also induce a progressive neurotoxic degeneration of cutaneous nerves when used in high concentrations or for a long period of time...

Given its analgesic and anti-nociceptive effect, capsaicin has been used in the management of neuropathic discomfort, post-herpetic neuralgia, neuropathy of patients with diabetes and/or HIV,...

Like a person using capsaicin lotion to treat pain, the colonists will initially be uncomfortable (and cough) but then the responsible nerves will rapidly be exhausted and desensitized and the colonists will no longer be uncomfortable. They might actually be relatively numb. That "neurotoxic degeneration of cutaneous nerves" sounds ominous - it is not good to be numb. That will have to do with the concentrations involved.

Answer 2

Other answers have addressed the serious problems with living in pepper spray, so let's assume you've dealt with that and move on to the food issue:

Chickens.

Okay, presumably you've brought some sort of gene stock for farming because you're not an absolute idiot. Let's assume that enough of it survived to get started. I've never heard of any plants being negatively affected by capsaicin, so you're probably good there. But what if you want some meat in your diet? Livestock requires a lot of space even if you have the infrastructure for factory farming, which you don't.

Which brings us to chickens. Capsaicin affects mammals, but not birds. (This is not a coincidence--chilies evolved capsaicin to discourage mammals that would chew up their seeds in preference for birds that would swallow them whole and poop them out far and wide.) So chickens, geese, turkeys, ostriches, and any other food birds you may have will be able to live outside with no significant difficulty, and will likely provide the great bulk of your colony's protein. And of course that also means plenty of eggs!

Dairy supplies will be limited and valuable, as cows/goats/whatever have to be raised indoors in limited space. Red meat is a rare luxury, available mainly when an old or injured animal is put down. Although, oddly enough, it may skew towards veal--bull calves would be slaughtered immediately after birth to save resources, rather than raised to adult size first. In any case, if four-legged livestock are raised at all it will be strictly for milk, with meat being a happy byproduct.

(Oh--in addition to repelling mammals, capsaicin also appears to have anti-fungal properties. So you may be out of luck if you brought a stock of morel and truffle spores.)

Answer 3

It sounds like the simplest solution will be to build greenhouses and tents to live in and grow Earth plants to eat. Air and water can be filtered to remove the toxins or at least bring them down to tolerable levels.

Since the "heat" in the local plant life is not tolerable, but I am assuming the plants are otherwise edible or useful as raw materials, then plants can be processed by soaking or boiling them in alcohol or some other solvent which removes the noxious materials. This is done either outdoors, or in a separate facility where people in protective suits and masks can oversee the process. How the waste is disposed of can be dealt with in a multitude of ways, including making parabolic mirrors and heating the waste into an incandescent plasma, breaking everything down into its raw atoms (this is by far the most extreme method, but heating the material until the toxins have broken down and then disposing of the waste is likely to work with most biologicals).

Humans will find the place unpleasant, and living in greenhouses likely to be rather restrictive and slowing a lot of their planned expansion through the world, but nothing really insurmountable. Long term, a great deal of effort is going to be made understanding the local ecology and determining how to breed plants for a much lower level of "heat". Of course if plants need to generate this much "heat", then you should really be asking pointed questions about the animal life as well....

Answer 4

Capsaicin is irritating: when coming in contact with eyes or mucous membranes of mammals, it produces pain and breathing difficulty, that's why it is used in pepper spray and by polices to disperse ill intentioned targets.

Since you state

A certain concentration even permeates the very air they breathe.

this means that they will constantly feel like being sprayed with pepper spray.

While the content in the food can be somehow mitigated (alcohol is a good solvent, while casein present in milk and cheese completely inactivates it), they will be forced to wear gas masks to be able to perform any activity.

As you might know, performing intense physical activity while wearing a gas mask is challenging, to put it mildly.

Their only hope is to evolve by not being sensitive to capsaicin any more. But that would take generations before being effective.

Answer 5

I take it you want them to survive?

The things that might kill them off early on are:

(a) the level of capsaicin vapour in the air which might act sufficiently like a perma-pepper spray that they just can't see well enough to accomplish anything. Either they need masks (if you want to up their reliance on technology) or the airborne level needs to be low enough to just create mild but tolerable eye discomfort (if you want to make things marginally more bearable for them long-term);

(b) available food / water being so spicy that people can't bear to eat / drink enough (or can't do so without vomiting it back up) and die of starvation or thirst.

If they can cope sufficiently with the airborne capsaicin and keep down some food and water, they will probably be able to survive, though I would imagine life will be pretty unbearable until they develop a strong tolerance.

The hottest sauce I've tried is Blair's 3a.m. reserve at around 2 million Scovilles. I tried just a drop on the tine of a fork, and it caused me a good 10 minutes of pain. I can't imagine being able to consume enough food / water to survive if it were all a similar heat to the Blair's, let alone the horror of getting that level of heat in my eyes (or on my genitals) from simple exposure to the air.

Answer 6

Staying indoors solves this problem. The colonists just have to survive long enough to prepare "indoors".

Most of the raw environmental danger is immaterial. It is exposure to the environment that is a problem. The described environment is so harsh and so inescapably unpleasant that the colonists would likely prioritize separating themselves from that environment as thoroughly as possible.

A large building or complex of buildings is unlikely to bother the colonists all that much. After all, they've spent a great deal of time living in the colony ship itself (back when it was intact). Instead of dealing with the capsaicin in the environment, the colonists would assemble relatively airtight structures as quickly as they possibly could.

Specific mechanisms would depend on what they could build and maintain most reliably, but coming from an interplanetary colony ship suggests that they have options potentially up to self-sufficient, hermetically sealed structures constantly recycling air and chemical products.

Trips outside would be limited to necessary excursions, and involve protective gear like goggles and face masks or even portable oxygen tanks (like a scuba diver). Resources that need to be cleaned of capsaicin (maybe they need to eat some of the local food to maintain the population, etc.) could be addressed with various chemical processes (another answer mentioned some solvents that might help).

These techniques would be best handled by trained specialists, but even if specialists were not available the colony ship would almost certainly have extensive technical information in a library that would preclude the need to learn the techniques from scratch.

The major question would be if the colonists are able to build these structures given the difficulty of the environment. The answer to that depends on how much capsaicin is in the air (especially), as the effect could range from mildly irritating to totally debilitating. That's under your control as you define the setting, and so you can choose whatever level of attrition might apply until the airtight structures are prepared.

The society of the colonists may not be affected by the spicy environment much at all, aside from being organized to limit contact with the outdoors. If they could survive on the colony ship, they can probably survive on this planet, as long as there is a large enough living population to perform necessary colony tasks.

Answer 7

The other answers ignore a common method for people have used for transforming terrain to improve habitability: Fire.

Firstly, on finding the air toxic, most of the settlers will return to their sealed escape pods. These escape pods were designed for space, and atmospheric re-entry, and hence they are tolerant to thermal heat. Escape pods also have radios, so that the different groups can coordinate.

People will need only use their space suits to enter the forest, light a rip-roaring fire, then go back to their pods, and wait. The pods, as stated above, are resistant to thermal heat, so fire won't be an issue. With the first 100,000 square miles cleared, they can begin Earth based agriculture. This agriculture will compete with local flora to reduce the quantity of "spicy air" in the area, and hence allow people to emerge from the pods.

And if burning 100,000 square miles of forest is not sufficient, people are destructive enough to destroy all the flora on the planet, and replace it with gentle Earth Flora.

While this isn't the most pleasant answer, these are humans after all. When they need to decide between their own deaths and destroying the environment, they will destroy the environment.

Answer 8

Well, they have no choice, so they have to take the heat. The component that makes peppers hot is called capsaicin. Pure capsaicin has 16 million scoville, so that's the maximum any of the plants or creatures may have.

So they could for example drink lots of alcohol with their food, because capsaicin is soluble in that. The better idea - since you don't know which plants or creatures are toxic for humans - is to grow their own seeds from earth. They may still be a bit spicy, but they may be mild enough to get used to them. On earth, there are many societies that like to eat spicy hot meals, that may be too hot for people who are not used to it.

Answer 9

They probably wouldn't have known what the plant life was like on the planet before colonizing it so they probably have the means to grow Earth food.

Even if the green houses on the ship were destroyed, they can purify water by distilling it and use it to wash \ soak the local foodstuff to make it more mild.

Another way to counteract the spiciness is to dilute with water (eat a lot of soups), or add sugar, acid (lemon, vinegar), or dairy.

Finally, if they do have some starchy foods like rice, potatoes, bread, etc, they can eat it along with the local stuff to make it more palatable

Answer 10

I have a lame answer but here it goes: Capsazepine. Capsazepine stops the painful sensation of heat and pain caused by capsaicin (and some other irratents such as the venom of some taranchula species) by blocking the activation of the TRPV1 ion channels. It has also has been experimentally used to desensitize the receptors permanently, to provide relief from chronic pain in specific cases.

Logistically this is a great solution since Capsazepine is created by the chemical modification of capsaicin!

Capsaicin does not actually cause a chemical burn, or indeed any direct tissue damage at all. The inflammation resulting from exposure to capsaicin is believed to be the result of the body's reaction to nerve excitement.(source) This would cause the body to inflame tissues as if it has undergone a burn or abrasion and the resulting inflammation would cause tissue damage in cases of extreme exposure.

Side note: The TRPV1 ion channels are thought to be responsible for our range of temperature sensation.

Answer 11

An alien biogenesis and billions of years of random evolution would result in a completely different biochemistry. Whatever organisms lived there might well be based on carbon and water but probably not DNA as we know it. The amino acids used (if they were used at all) might be different with a different handedness and D-amino acids are toxic for most life on Earth which use L-amino acids.

Basically life there would be at very best inedible and irritant and more likely toxic every step of the way. It would be like living in an organic chemistry lab where some mad scientist had cooked up thousands of different chemicals at random and was asking people to breathe them and eat them. So you scenario is in some ways likely but would be just the tip of the iceberg. It wouldn't end well, everyone would have to live in domes isolated from the environment to stay alive.