Many people have through their physics education gotten a basic grasp of relativity. However translating this into a more general understanding of the effect of the equations is something different.

In the following I will by an example, or rather a thought-experiment try to illustrate how the inside of the event horizon of a black hole is basically not a part of our universe.

If you have a basic physics education you will be well versed in how gravitational time dilation works. Let us say that you are watching a spaceship fly into a black hole. As the ship approaches the event horizon, to you it will seem to be moving more slowly, and you will in fact never see it go into the black hole. From your frame of reference, outside the event horizon, the ship will take an infinity to enter the black hole.

Now, from the frame of reference of the spaceship, this is of course not so. If we disregard the sorry fact that the ship and anybody in it will be spaghettified and destroyed, the passengers will observe themselves fall into the black hole quite rapidly.

This will of course mean that from the frame of reference of anybody within our universe, the spaceship never leaves our universe. Never. Ever.

Now consider that you are in an extremely powerful rescue vessel. A vessel with engines so powerful that only the theoretical limits of physics limits its capabilities. That means that as long as its on the outside of the event horizon, it can pull any mass away from it.

This would mean that it is never to late to save someone falling into a black hole. Just wait a few years, or a few million years, or a couple of billion years, until we have developed strong enough spaceships, and you can pull them right out. - And for the people on the ship entering the black hole mere seconds (or tiny fractions of a second) will have passed, (This was in fact done in the first episode of the less-known Gene Roddenberry series “Andromeda”.)

Does this mean that you don’t have to worry about falling into a black hole? You never have to give up the hope of being saved? Quite the contrary. For you the process will happen quite rapidly, and you will be swallowed up by the black hole in mere seconds (or tiny fractions of a second).

This also has a few interesting aspects. In the seconds in which you are approaching the event horizon you can actually watch the entire (future) history of our universe run by. You will of course have problems “seeing” eventually as photons will have increasing problems catching up with you, but in principle information from our universe can reach you all the time until you enter the black hole.

But this means that the “time” you might experience inside the black hole (disregarding the fact that you won’t be alive and the question of weather the term “time” has any meaning inside the black hole), will be a “time” that does not exist within our universe. Imagine that...