Supercomputer Predicts Dangerous Earthquake (13)

the last days are upon us bone dry here in our rainy season!

The main thing to understand about all computers, is that they just crunch numbers. They don't (yet) make up new theories, or come to conclusions which their programmers haven't thought up.

When a computer finds an answer which is CORRECT, that wasn't previously available, it is always because the NUMBER CRUNCHING was previously too complex and multi-threaded for a human to manage the calculations on by themselves.

Earthquakes are not predictable, because the mechanisms which lead to them are only partly known, and more important, only partly KNOWABLE. It is only relatively recently that it came to be generally recognized that the Earth's outer crust is NOT rigidly glued to the inner regions, and past that, that some regions of the crust are moving in different directions, and at different speeds than others.

We don't have a complete and detailed map of all these regions at this time, which is the "partly known" aspect. Even more significantly for the sake of making predictions, we don't have ANY detailed maps of ANY of the detailed intersections of the various chunks of the crust. That's the "unknowable" part of the situation.

If we knew the EXACT details of the mechanical structure of the intersections of the various crust plates in a given region, then we could use existing knowledge of friction and the effect of pressure on various rock structures, to make a reasonable calculation about the relative movement of two crust plates in a given region.

But we don't have ANY subsurface sensors, at a depth that would be required to get that information, and no DEEP STRATA maps of sufficient detail of any regions that would be needed to make predictions.