A new understanding of the way fluid-saturated microcracked rocks deform suggests that networks of stress-monitoring sites could lead to earthquake forecasting analogous to the way networks of meteorological stations allow weather forecasting and prediction of storms. This new understanding is believed to be a major advance that otters more hope for forecasting earthquakes than was envisioned in the survey Living on an Active Earth: Perspectives on Earthquake Science of the National Research Council's Committee on the Science of Earthquakes, summarized by Tom Jordan in the Opinion for August 2002. This Opinion may also be considered as a response to the plea by John E. Ebel in the Opinion for January 2003, for seismologists to begin forecasting earthquakes. This note was stimulated by confirmation of the complex critical nature of deformation at a stress-monitoring site in Iceland and its implications for the NRC report on earthquake science. The linearity and self-similarity of the well known Gutenberg-Richter relationship demonstrate that the Earth behaves as a complex critical system with self-organized criticality, where minor disturbances (small earthquakes or fractures) may cascade into major fractures and large earthquakes. Such criticality is claimed to specifically exclude the possibility of the deterministic prediction of the time, magnitude, and location of impending large earthquakes. Resolving this fundamental difficulty is one of the four complementary perspectives of earthquake research recognized by the NRC report, and as Jordan suggests provides “the opportunity for exciting basic science.” We here speculate on some of this new exciting science. Although as suggested criticality makes the deterministic prediction of the time, magnitude, and location of impending large earthquakes rather unlikely, large earthquakes cannot take place without the accumulation of sufficient stress for the appropriate magnitude energy release. Both observations and the theory of the evolution of fluid-saturated microcracked rock under stress ( anisotropic poro-elasticity …