Not what I recall from Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler.
Quite the contrary, even if you are not turned into spaghetti, you hit the singularity in a pretty short time, say 0.0001 seconds for a 30-solar-mass hole (the time will be proportional to the mass).
If we’re going that direction, let’s go all the way.
A novel featuring an intelligent, malignant black hole. One that demands sacrifices, at that.
Black holes don’t worry me, but I do spend many sleepless nights worrying about the eventual run-down of the Universe, when there’s nothing but uniform grey, in a mere 10^10^56 years…
Pretty much every thing in the universe is going to pull you in. Every star. Every planet. Dwarf stars. Dwarf planets. Some sizable asteroids. Pieces of space debris.
You are like a single bit in giant supercomputer. Your sector may have been unread for billions of years, but someday a process will flip you.
Sleep tight.
In all fairness, it’s not just the star/planet/black hole’s fault. You have mass, and your mass is doing its share of pulling.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that black hole is falling into you. (Although it would be an exaggeration to say your contribution to the process was significant.)
In one sense there’s nothing particularly strange about a black hole, at least from a long distance, except that you can’t see it directly. Most black holes glow brightly because of the intense heat generated by infalling matter still outside the event horizon, but the event horizon itself is very nearly black, except for weird quantum effects called Hawking radiation. But black holes are ordinary and non-frightening at a distance because they’re nothing more than massive bodies whose gravitational force diminishes as the square of the distance just like with anything else.
It’s at the event horizon and beyond that very weird things happen. Time is slowed by gravity as seen by a distant observer, and the event horizon is the point where time stops altogether. What happens beyond is a matter of speculation but for the relevant equations to be meaningful one has to postulate that spacetime is so distorted that the time dimension and the spatial dimension to the singularity change places.
To an outside observer, it will take an infinite amount of time.
To you, the one falling in, it’ll be all too brief. And don’t struggle; that’ll just make it even briefer.
I certainly take comfort in the time intervals between major extinction events on Earth, but oddly I also find it very satisfying to contemplate how insignificant the complete destruction of Earth would be amid the scale and grandeur of the universe.
I guess some folks are worriers, and some aren’t.
Gravity is responsible for everything.
You could even live on an Earth sized shell around an Earth mass black hole and enjoy Earth-like gravity. Or a smaller black hole with a smaller shell.
Agreed. We’ll be charging them too.
(You made me quote Python. I cannot forgive you for this.)
‘ear? Is that rat tart?
They’d only frighten me if I was close enough to one where I might actually have a chance of being caught in one. And I would absolutely love the fact that I had the chance to be in such a situation.
Oooh, more motivation for diet and exercise!
Nah, black holes are pretty awesome. In fact I’d jump into one myself. Under the proviso that I was immortal and facing the heat death of the universe. In that case, I think there’s a pretty good chance I’d be fired out of a white hole on the other side, with a fresh new universe to explore. And if not, better that than dissolving into a bath of warm photons.
On the contrary, you should be glad that we have a black hole at the centre of our galaxy. It acts as a gravitational focus for all the stars, gas, dust and other objects which form our galactic neighbourhood, and keeps it all together. If the galaxy were smaller, or less massive or dense, then the various elements created by fusion and other processes would become dispersed and fail to form into planets. It may even be the case that supermassive black holes formed early in the history of the universe, and gathered material around themselves to become galaxies; if so then we owe our existence (at least in part) to black holes.
D’oh!!1! 
Thanks for the correction.
Either I just pulled off a really great whooshing allusion, or you pulled off a really great whoosh. I’m not sure which. 
Actually…I think we both did. 
You might be in luck (maybe):
Yeah, I think that everyone pretty much expects that, once we eventually figure out quantum gravity, it’ll turn out that the core of a black hole has a finite size. But we haven’t figured out quantum gravity yet, so we really don’t know.