Talk:Sunset Shimmer/@comment-24208499-20131207110722/@comment-10390252-20140120220828

@Jykale,

You're not thinking this through. Why did humans to frozen wastelands or ice, the tops of mountains or an airless ball of rock washed in unforgiving radiation or freezing cold? Because they're there and our instinctive curiosity means that we need to see them.

The ponies are psychologically similar enough to humans that they would have exactly the same motive. Remember that the statue is just a disguise for the other end of the portal - it's real shape is unknown. However, I'm pretty sure that the laws of nature in the EqG world would not have been known before the first explorers stepped through.

Possibly, the reason the mirror was 'forbidden' was that, after Starswirl realised that the other world was not magical, he decided the program was non-viable in the long term and stopped the explorations. The mirror was bundled off to Fort Canterlot and put into long-term storage and forgotten about until Sunset (who is as much as a bookwork egghead as Twilight) found references to it in some ancient and obscure academic text and started putting the pieces together in her head.