Fact Check

Nepal's celebrity astrologer Harihar Adhikari, also an actor, has appeared in a podcast with Sanjay Silwal Gupta where Adhikari talks about different topics and, in the process, make several interesting claims.

But he received public backlash from netizens when he said NASA, the US space agency, teaches Sanskrit language – the ancient language of South Asia – as a "two-year capsule course".

The two-hour-long podcast contains several other interesting claims too.

They include:

• The sun is 3.3 million earths combined and the etymology of ‘Rishi’
• NASA teaches Sanskrit as a two-year capsule course
• Sanskrit is the best language to communicate with aliens
• Challenge is to make a working solar system on earth
• And so on

NepalMinute has fact-checked these claims in the video.

• Claim 1:

Adhikari said: “The sun is 3.3 million earths combined.”

Looking at the number, he must have tried to compare the masses of the sun and the earth.

But he is one zero-off. The sun is actually 330,000 earths combined. That is the ratio of the mass of the sun to the mass of the earth. 

This information is available in NASA webpage here.

Then he goes on to say, the origin of the English word ‘research’ came from the Sanskrit word ‘rishi’. 

A simple Google search on the word etymology shows research originated from an old French word ‘recherché’.

It gets even more interesting now.

• Claim 2

Some 42 minutes in, Adhikari said: “NASA teaches the Sanskrit language as a two-year capsule course.”

He also claimed coding – computer programming is being done in Sanskrit.

After some digging to know how he came to the fact, there is a link between NASA and Sanskrit, which he must have extrapolated.

In 1985, Rick Briggs, an artificial intelligence (AI) researcher at NASA Ames Research Centre published a paper in AI Magazine titled ‘Knowledge Representation in Sanskrit and Artificial Intelligence’. 

In the paper, he pointed out the difficulty in natural language processing (NLP), and he said a possible solution lies in ‘Sanskrit’.

And he focused on grammar and paraphrasing methods in Sanskrit, which makes Sanskrit unambiguous for AI to better understand and process.

A fact-check on coding with Sanskrit reveals that there is some truth to his claim. There are programming languages which are being developed  to code using Sanskrit, like ‘Vedic’ but the adoption is poor and will definitely take long years to reckon with. 

Claim 3

Adhikari claimed, that Sanskrit being a “universal language” will also be understood by aliens (extra-terrestrials). 

Humans have not yet met any alien as such. No such information has ever been made public. But it is safe to say any civilisation which is able to travel to earth from distant space – thousands or even millions of light years away -- will have a more advanced form of communication than language. 

If they can teleport here or travel at light speed, they can telepath or speak without words.

Because speaking brain to brain is lossless and will be more logical for advanced civilisations.
Sanskrit like other languages has grammar which is difficult to grasp in a few minutes, let alone speak.

So, it is a completely different thing to drag in Sanskrit as a linguistic solution to talk with aliens. More information can be accessed here about extra-terrestrial linguistics published in Harvard Gazette.

Claim 4

Some 1 hour and 25 minutes in, Adhikari challenges scientists (if it has not already been done) to make an artificial replica of the solar system here on the earth, which functions without any engines as our solar system does.

His challenge is impossible to carry out on the earth, as the mass of the earth is far-far greater than the mass of our replica. Because of that, the earth’s mass will produce stronger gravitational attraction – here on earth, than our model replica.

But this has already been done in space in 1957 when the first satellite ‘Sputnik 1’ was launched. The satellites move around the Earth, around Mars… without any fuel or engines. This works on the same principles as planets do.

They only use fuel for ‘path correction’ and occasional ‘orbit correction’. 

This can be understood by watching this short clip on YouTube by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Conclusion

The podcast is a loosely bound talk between people so people will take it as entertainment but there is a huge likelihood that a naïve audience will get misled.

There is so much information vacuum which needs to be filled in Nepal's cultural beliefs that can be scientific and logical. More research is needed to access these scientific potentials in the field.

What Gupta could have done is this: focused on the expertise of the person he has invited to the show rather than letting him or her go on and on. And instead of naïvely accepting the claims, he could have challenged the interviewees' claims and cross-question more and more to extract the truth. He never challenged him, nor sought solid evidences from Adhikari.

In an hour and 30 minutes, they talked about leaders of Nepal coming to astrologer Adhikari to see their future, not of the country. He said, "the netaharu were only concerned about their future", which every Nepali agrees is a fact.