We know so little about magic...
I've spent over a century of my life studying magic, and yet, for all I've learned, I still feel as if I am little further along than a colt who has just cracked open his first spell book. Why, you might ask? Simple: While I know a thousand spells and more, I have no real understanding as to the why's and how's of how magic works. The mysteries of a spell, any spell, have eluded me.
Oh, I know plenty about the biological aspects of spell casting: I know how our horns work in converting magical energy into magic spells. But can any pony tell me how and why, exactly, a certain set of thoughts and images, when focused upon in our minds, cause a growth of tissue and bone jutting out of our foreheads to convert magical energy to create exactly the effect we intend? More precisely, how do spells work, and why do they work without any real hiccups?
I mean, take the spell that transforms apples into oranges: Can you even begin to grasp how insanely complex a change that spell causes, on so many different levels? The peels, the flesh of the fruit, the seeds, those are just the start. When we go down to the cellular level, and look even further using more advanced magics, we see ever increasing degrees of complexity, and yet the spell perfectly performs the task to the point that I, years ago, took a seed from an apple that I transformed into an orange, planted it, and took seeds from the fruit, and planted them to get perfectly ordinary orange trees. I am up to five generations thus far... and counting. Not a single leaf is out of place. The orange, fifty years later, remains an orange, as do all that came after.
And then we get into the mind-numbing complexities of the spells that can be used to change a living, flesh and blood creature into another living, flesh and blood creature. If a fruit's structure is mindbogglingly complex, it cannot hold a candle to the body of the average pony. And worse, everything is constantly in motion, and any effort to still that motion can be fatal. And then there's the whole matter of mass: How can you change a pony to a breezie, and not have a huge pile of unused pony messily littering the floor afterwards? Let that image sink in for a moment before I continue. Yes, well, I'm glad I skipped breakfast, too. More to the point, when you change the breezie back, where does the mass come from to do so? Why aren't you left with a just a tiny pony, or just a tiny part of a pony? Another wonderful mental image. My gift to you.
And let us not even start on teleportation, especially given how much we know about how everything in the cosmos is constantly in motion, at velocities that are beyond our ability to fathom, let alone measure. When a unicorn teleports from place to place, how does that pony not end up in the vast reaches of space, or inside a solid object? Or colliding with the ground or a nearby tree at speeds sufficient to render their body to paste? Or with large chunks of them missing or in the wrong place? Why does that pony invariably end up with their hooves planted on the ground, and why is the pony teleported, complete with skin, bones, tissues, organs, blood, and various fluids, along with the contents of their digestive tract, all right where they belong. Not once in the history of teleportation magic has their been an error that could not be attributed to operator error, rather than an error with the spell itself. They should be happening hourly, given how complex the art of teleportation really is.
Our instincts, perhaps, are just too good for our own good. We can do these things so easily, so naturally, that we never had to learn how to do them, beyond the initiation of the spell. We think things, and they happen. That's it. We know nothing of the route from thought to action, just that somehow, we go from point A to point B, and it works. And in a thousand, thousand ways, that terrifies me.
When we cast a spell, it is more like we are pressing a button, and then things happen. The button just happens to be affixed to our heads, and a little more complex in pressing than most. We understand nothing about how spells work, and why. We are little better than a monkey flipping a switch to get a banana as part of an experiment. The monkey knows it gets a banana when it throws the switch, we know we get a result when we cast a spell. Neither we, nor the monkey, contemplate the whys or hows, when any other kind of pony would ponder this in detail, and question it to the point of distraction. We're the only ponies foolish enough to risk our lives using a process whose working we know nothing of without ever considering the inherent danger in that action.
The next time you hear some proponent of the "Unicorn Master Race" philosophy start spouting their rhetoric, tell them what I just told you. Ten bits says they won't be able to give a counter-argument that makes any rational sense whatsoever. Of course, they can't give a rational counter-argument to anything that contradicts them, so that's an easy bet for me to win.
Never delude yourselves, my fellow unicorns: We've been given an impossibly potent gift, and our over-reliance of it has left us stunted, mentally, in ways that I have only recently begun to categorize. Earth ponies and pegasai have proven themselves to know a great deal more about their spheres of competence than we ever have of ours. If earth ponies knew as little about farming, or pegasai as little about the wind and weather, as we do about the workings of magic, we'd all starve to death, if the uncontrolled weather didn't get us first. We are, as a race, SIMPLE in all the most unpleasant definitions of the word.
Imagine if we knew as much about our spells as, say, earth ponies know about farming. You laugh, the lot of you, but that is because you think farming is simple. You think that they just plant a seed, water it, and then a tree pops out. No, it is nowhere near that easy. I've spoken with earth ponies about their work, and the sheer volume of information regarding the subject they maintain in their heads, once you get them started, is nothing short of tremendous.
There's the quality of the soil, for one: Different seeds need different kinds of soil to grow. A dozen different factors based just on the "plain old common dirt" will determine which seed, if any, will thrive in the soil. Then, there's how the plant needs to be raised. Yes, you pour water on it, but how much, and how often? Too much water can kill a plant as completely as too little. You have to constantly check the plant for pests that will eat the plant or its fruit (Which are legion), check it for diseases(which are even more multitudinous), and make sure that the soil is well fertilized, and is getting the right amount of sunlight. And the common farmer has to do this for dozens of plants, if not hundreds, of multiple varieties which all have different requirements to maintain. And they have to get this right for the overwhelming majority of their plants, year after year after year. And they do. When it comes to farming, the margin of error is MICROSCOPIC, compared to that of a spell. And then, after determining when the crops are ripe, there's the means of harvesting the food, and converting it into preserves, baking it into pies, or just properly cooking it so you don't get ill from eating it, like you can from eating raw potatoes.
If you were to compare their works to ours, an earth pony does the equivalent of working dozens, or even hundreds, of spells at the same time, and works them for years on end, and does so with more skill, patience, and above all else, SUCCESS... than any wizard who has lived in recorded history.
If we understood our spells even a fraction as well as an earth pony farmer understood his tradecraft, we'd be able to do far more than throw spells around. We'd be able to make real progress in understanding the universe as a whole...
And if earth ponies had been granted the gift of magic, and unicorns were stuck with managing the crops, they would have unlocked the secrets of the cosmos centuries ago, and ascended to some distant astral plane far beyond our fleshly concerns... while we unicorns were moronically throwing seeds at the ground and wondering why they weren't instantly growing into apple trees. They would be as gods, while we would be lucky if we didn't starve, while the pegasai just pointed at us and laughed at how stupid we were. How stupid we are. And they'd have every right to do so.
Consider all of that, the next time you think to speak ill of an earth pony. We have been granted the keys to the universe, to becoming the ultimate powers in the cosmos, and we're barely competent enough to use them as a poking stick. Were it not so effective a stick that it could potentially wipe out entire cities, we'd be serving them, begging for food, rather than they paying us to move the sun and moon about.