The ability to predict earthquakes in the lab raises the possibility that the same thing will be possible for real earthquakes, too

Earthquakes occurred here in 1857, 1881, 1901, 1922, 1934, and 1966, suggesting a pattern in which quakes occur every 22 years give or take a few years. Geologists know that as a quake approaches, the gouge material begins to fail, emitting groans and cracks as it shears--a kind of seismic chatter. "We show that by listening to the acoustic signal emitted by a laboratory fault, machine learning can predict the time remaining before it fails with great accuracy," they say. The first and most obvious question it raises is whether the same technique could predict real earthquakes accurately.