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Trying to predict earthquakes is like taking a craps shoot at a carnival...in reality I don't think they'll ever be able to predict to within reasonable certainty when a quake will happen. You would have to know every single variable for every single possible occurrence/outcome to be able to predict a quake with 90-100% certainty. In any case, the system would ultimately rest on quantum physics and that immediately throws your predictive abilities right out the window.
In any case, as I mentioned, the Richter Scale is not about prediction, it's about quantifying the amount of energy released in an earthquake. The same with the Mercali Scale, except in that case it's the amount of damage done by an earthquake.
The term aftershock can be very problematical. Unless the series of quakes is related, i.e. belonging to the same system of stresses and geological provenance, then defining what an aftershock is can be difficult. What I mean by this, is you could call every earthquake that ever happened an aftershock of the previous one, no matter where/when it is. Why??....because it's conceivable that an earthquake in California could setup up a stress all the way across the Pacific Plate that might trigger an earthquake in Japan 10 years later.
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