The catastrophic magnitude of life and monetary losses associated with earthquakes deserve serious attention and mitigation measures. However, in addition to the pre-earthquake and post-earthquake alleviation actions, the scientific community indeed needs to reconsider the possibilities of earthquake predictions using non-seismic precursors. A significant number of studies in the recent decades have reported several possible earthquake precursors such as anomalies in electric field, magnetic field, gas/aerosol emissions, ionospheric signals, ground water level, land surface temperature, surface deformations, animal behaviour, thermal infrared signals, atmospheric gravity waves, and lightning. Such substantial number of scientific articles and reported anomalous signals cannot be overlooked without a thoughtful appraisal. Here, we provide an opinion on the way forward for earthquake prediction in terms of challenges and possibilities while using non-seismic precursors. A general point of concern is the widely varying arrival times and the amplitudes of the anomalies, putting a question mark on their universal applicability as earthquake markers. However, a unifying concept which does not only define the physical basis of either all or most of these anomalies but which also streamlines their characterisation procedure must be the focus of future earthquake precursory research. Advancements in developing the adaptable instrumentation for in-situ observations of the claimed non-seismic precursors must be the next step and the satellite observations should not be taken as a replacement for field-based research. We support the need to standardise the precursor detection techniques and to employ a global-scale monitoring system for making any possible earthquake predictions reliable.

地震造成的灾难性人员伤亡和金钱损失值得认真注意并采取缓解措施。但是，除了地震前和地震后的缓解措施外，科学界确实需要重新考虑使用非地震前兆进行地震预测的可能性。最近几十年的大量研究报告了几种可能的地震先兆，例如电场，磁场，气体/气溶胶排放，电离层信号，地下水位，地表温度，表面变形，动物行为，热红外信号的异常。 ，大气重力波和闪电。如果没有经过深思熟虑的评估，那么大量的科学文章和报告的异常信号将不容忽视。这里，我们就使用非地震先兆的挑战和可能性提供了关于地震预测的展望。一个普遍关注的问题是到达时间和异常幅度的变化很大，这在它们作为地震标志物的普遍适用性上提出了一个问号。但是，一个统一的概念不仅要定义所有或大多数这些异常的物理基础，而且还要简化其表征过程，这必将成为未来地震前兆研究的重点。下一步必须是开发适应性仪器，以对要求保护的非地震前兆进行现场观测，而卫星观测不应替代现场研究。