I did not know predicting earthquakes is one of the hardest problems in science and specifically where, how large, and when they are expected to happen. I thought a lot of resources where devoted to this study but Brendan Meade clarified that money is put into investigating the aftermath of earthquakes, which benefits seismologists. I also found enlightening the methods used to anticipate these disasters. I was amazed to learn that there is now the possibility to measure the Earth's surface movements with high precision, which is a proxy to how big an earthquake might be. I correctly anticipated the importance of numerical simulations to Dr. Meade's efforts, but it is sad to know that there is still not enough computational resources and that the physical models currently used are oversimplified.
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It also surprised me a lot that not enough money was put into traying to accurately predict when an earthquake would happen. It was specially surprising to me because we see that a lot of countries have really developed earthquake damage mitigating mechanisms (specially Japan), so I would expect that they would have that same level of priority for actually predicting when earthquakes would happen. Also, it surprised me how inaccurate the plate and rock movement models really are, because I remember learning about plate tectonics in middle and high school as if it were an extremely consolidated theory with a very complete mathematical model (of course we didn't go into that level of detail at the time, but that is the impression that I got as time went by).
It is surprising indeed to feel like we are the in the 90s or earlier as I assumed back then the constraints regarding many of the most exciting problems would have probably been not enough computational resources and that the current physical models are oversimplified, but indeed it does feel like we are still in the comparative dark ages in this field. However, like you, I am hopeful for progress given the instruments now being deployed to measure the earth's movement.