Brendan Meade and Susan Murphy - A Question I'd have Asked

After watching the interview with Brendan Meade and Susan Murphy and learning about how difficult it is to predict earthquakes, I was left wondering more about how prediction in the earth science field will advance, and how earth scientists feel about the difficulty required to advance. Because of the rarity of earthquakes and how difficult it is to collect meaningful data, simulation and AI are becoming much more helpful in predicting earthquakes. However, from how Professor Meade described the situation, it seems present earthquake models are so simplified that they aren't that helpful, and that making them more complex would require a leap in available computing power. Here I would have asked, "can the field advance without an increase in computer power for simulations? Does it ever feel hopeless to not have any new helpful data, and to instead have to simply wait for technology to advance?" This problem reminded me somewhat of the struggle particle psychists feel when there's a lapse between new large sources of data like particle accelerators. I took a freshman seminar with particle physicist Lisa Randall last semester who spoke a bit about this, and how they have to wait for a more powerful particle accelerator potentially decades away before they can make any new large discoveries.