The thing is, if you fall into a black hole, you’re gonna die, but if it is a supermassive enough black hole you might not notice crossing the event horizon, and even live for a little while, let’s say an hour. Yes, you will be able to see your feet…
I am saying, there is a definite maximum time you can experience before impacting the singularity, and that corresponds to the time it takes to free-fall from the event horizon all the way in. Any acceleration beyond that will merely hasten your demise, and you can’t increase your distance from the singularity any more than you can go faster than the speed of light.
How, if light can’t move away from the singularity to go from your feet up to your eyes? What’s attaching your feet or any other part of you together if the electromagnetic force can’t propagate away from the singularity?
Your feet are falling towards the singularity, but so is your head, so light can get from your feet to your eyes even though it cannot get farther from the singularity. (Or, let’s put it this way: your head falls downwards towards the singularity faster than the light upwards from your feet does.) If the black hole is really huge, you would not notice much of a difference in acceleration of your feet versus of your head that tends to rip you apart, it would feel like normal weightless free-fall (for a little while 
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Are you saying that any object that passes the even horizon intermediately turns and arrows straight for the singularity? Most things are not aimed at the center as they fall in but are instead moving around the singularity as they pass the event horizon. Does something special happen at the horizon to make them zoom straight to the singularity?
Is there some reason that an object couldn’t make an elliptical orbit of a singularity akin to a comet orbiting our sun?
I get there is no escape from the black hole and that, no matter what, the endpoint of that object is a meeting with the singularity but I see no reason a given object can’t loop around the singularity some times before its ultimate end (which would mean the object moves away from the singularity during part of that orbit).
I have not considered charged or rotating balck holes… but I am saying that inside the event horizon of a black hole, the radial coordinate becomes timelike, and therefore anything (including light) will inexorably follow a path where that coordinate decreases, so it can’t loop around the singularity in such a way that its distance increases even for part of the orbit. So there is no such super-close orbit; instead the object will spiral into the singularity, even if it has a bunch of angular momentum.
Not so, no more than the lack of ability to move away from the future prevents causality outside of a black hole. Locally, nothing at all is different between a spot just outside of an event horizon and a spot just inside, and the crossing of the horizon would be completely unnoticed by those doing the crossing.
If you don’t try to fight it and just let yourself free-fall in, you actually take the longest path possible (although that path is still uncomfortably short). If you do try to fight it by firing rocket engines or something (in any direction at all), then you can make the path arbitrarily short.
Biological evolution doesn’t care or have preferences, either.
So…adding energy (e.g. firing your rocket engines) to fight against the fall to the singularity shortens the time to get there?
That is counterintuitive.
Is this that flip between time and space that happens at the event horizon? (not sure if I said that right)
Yes, it is counterintuitive. And that’s not my preferred way of phrasing it, since it’s ambiguous: “Time” could refer to the t coordinate or to the timelike dimension. Outside of an event horizon, t is a timelike coordinate and r is a spacelike coordinate, while inside of an event horizon, t is a spacelike coordinate and r is a timelike coordinate. But this doesn’t really reflect anything fundamental about a black hole: It just means that t and r are poor choices of coordinates, in the vicinity of an event horizon. It’s sort of like arctic explorers, at a base near the North or South Pole: They could use latitude and longitude to describe locations in the base, but doing so would have some really wonky effects. So it makes more sense for them to establish some other coordinate system for use in the vicinity of the Pole, and using that other coordinate system, maps look perfectly normal.
That said, you can still say that inside of a black hole, the Singularity is always in your future, and that description does account for a lot of how black holes behave.
Anything that passes the event horizon in freefall with any trajectory is heading “straight to the singularity”, just along different “straight” paths.
The idea of multiple straight paths is already a feature in simple curved space. Consider the surface of a sphere, a smooth 2D curved space. Pick two random points A and B in this space. There are two directions from point A where you can walk in a straight line and reach B. For the surface of a sphere, these paths correspond to “great circle” routes. “Straight” means that infinitesimally small adjacent steps are parallel, i.e. things look straight locally. For a more kinetic view: consider the surface to be frictionless; place a test particle at point A; give it some initial oomph; and then let it coast without further influence. The test particle will trace out a path, and we can call that a “straight” path on this curved surface.
The latter view is like a particle under freefall in spacetime. A particle moving through curved spacetime with any initial trajectory and under no external influence will follow a “geodesic”, which is the generalization of a straight line. (“External” means rockets and stuff. Gravity isn’t an external force; it’s just responsible for the curved spacetime in the first place.)
Inside the event horizon, all geodesics (and also all paths allowed using rockets) trace a path to the singularity. Consider two particles: one dropped from rest just outside the event horizon and another entering the event horizon with substantial angular velocity. The geodesics these particles trace out through spacetime are different from one another, but both particles are, according to them, following “straight” paths to the singularity.
Which path takes less time? The particle that came in at an angle has substantial coordinate velocity, which should be a reminder that we need to take care about how we measure time. Even in special relativity, distances between points (or times to travel between them) depend on relative velocities. This is all the more complicated in GR where we can’t even talk about how far apart things are in space or time in a global sense. (You always have to integrate over proper intervals along a specific path.)
But we can ask how much the particles’ clocks advance as they head to the singularity. The one coming in at an angle gets there in less time. This is “obvious” in the most extreme case where the incoming particle is moving angularly at nearly the speed of light, in which case it definitely will get through it’s trip more quickly (and instantaneously in the limit v\rightarrow c.)
This is another example of why I love this message board.
It should be noted that all the posts assume General Relativity is true. Since GR can’t be completely true (since it’s not a quantum theory), it’s possible that none of the explanations are accurate.
In particular, it may be that black holes do not actually exist, but rather something only that looks very much like a black hole. Fuzzballs, Planck stars, gravastars, and dark energy stars are some examples.
The main thing is that they all prevent collapse to an actual singularity. So instead of passing through the event horizon when falling in, you instead go splat on a surface just outside where the horizon would be.
Among other things, these candidates solve the “firewall” problem, which suggests that by certain quantum mechanical arguments, there should be an incredibly hot surface at the event horizon (which, if it existed, would also prevent anything from falling through the horizon). But that seems inconsistent with other physical laws. You don’t expect random barriers to pop up in empty space.
These are all exceptionally speculative ideas with no positive evidence toward them–but on the other hand, the standard GR black hole with a singularity seems impossible, so there must be some alternative.
It’s possible we’ll never know if it’s possible to pass through an event horizon.
Well, maybe SOMEONE will know, but they won’t be able to tell anyone else.