A Thought Experiment

Bottom Image from http://www.boulder.swri.edu/~terrell/

A friend of yours stays a considerable distance away from the hole, but within sight. You wave quickly, but because the speed the light is traveling has been greatly reduced, your friend sees you in very, very slow motion. He begins to wave back, but you can hardly tell because it happens in the blink of an eye. Time itself has slowed down where you are.

So, what would happen if we could hover just above the event horizon of a black hole? Just far enough away so that with our high-tech thrusters at the velocity just below the speed of light we can still escape?

Well, ignoring the tremendous gravitational force exerted on you and the ship you can look away from the hole, but since the hole is pulling on the photons of light as they escape, they will curve as they travel. The overall result is a small circle that is visible, the rest blackness.

You decide that cannot bear to not know what lies inside of the black hole, and stop the thrusters, letting the ship be overcome by the immense pull of the hole. Since this is a rather large black hole, you do not notice much difference at first. You look away and everything is becoming distorted by the bending of light. Time has slowed down and is going towards infinity. The distorted images you see outside the hole are moving in blurs, so fast that you cannot make out anything at all. Then, you being to pick up speed as you've crossed the horizon. You panic, and hit your thrusters, but it only makes it worse. You hit the singularity and are crushed to death in an instant.