The contributions to the debate about earthquake prediction research in Nature so far, clearly show that we have hardly scratched the surface of the problem of how earthquake ruptures initiate and how to predict them. This arises from the difficulty of the problem and the lack of a vigorous program to study these questions. As Andrew Michael has said, funding for earthquake prediction research is a small fraction of the seismology program, in the U.S., and seismology is poorly funded compared to disciplines like astronomy.