“One of the things we’re trying to do is build an earthquake early warning industry,” says Robert de Groot, who is part of the ShakeAlert operations team, a project under the United States Geological Survey that detects the first signs of earthquakes.“We’re doing things that we haven’t really ever thought of.”The tech does not predict earthquakes—no one can do that, and the USGS also says it does not think it will learn to predict earthquakes “within the foreseeable future.” But it does detect them earlier than people usually feel them.And experts hope someday the alerts can be sent out even quicker, giving people more time to get out of harm’s way.Time to rollTuesday’s Android alert was powered by data from ShakeAlert, which detects when an earthquake begins on the West Coast and provides the information to state government agencies and third parties.Those S waves move quickly; the closer a person is to the earthquake, the less likely they are to get an alert before they feel the shaking."