From the "5.12" Wenchuan Earthquake, there has been a heated discussion in China about whether human can predict earthquake or not. Some people think human can investigate animal's abnormal phenomena, such as sudden migration, to predict earthquake happening, while others think human cannot predict earthquake because they have not found any rule about the earthquake. I don't think human can predict earthquake since earthquake happens without any prediction.
In the world, there are almost tens of earthquake happening every day whatever its magnitude is. Could such a lot of earthquake events make human understand how to predict it? No. We haven't find any rule or any statistical distribution, although it happens everyday. Some scientists have also developed a sand model to simulate the energy accumulation, but they never found any valuable information about earthquake prediciton. The conclusion they got is that Human cannot predict earthquake.
However, some people think Human can predict earthquake because animals' abnormal phenomena have happened before some earthquake happened which was recorded in the historical book. Nevertheless, how truly it was recorded? We cannot know. Modern psychology shows that we always see the world with our subjective thinking, and we sense the world using our subjective mind. People like to use daily experience to judge things. In fact, experience is not always reliable. Through scientific research, abnormal animal phenomena exists no relationship to earthquake, and these phenomena always happen with weather variation, environment changes, and others.
Perhaps one day in the future, human can predict earthquake. But now, we cannot. So the valuable thing is to improve house structure in order to resist the damage caused by earthquake, enhancing the capability to resist earthquake.