Here’s handy info to have. One never knows when one might find oneself in the situation described by Philip Ball in his May 18, 2007 report in Nature:
How to survive in a black hole
So there you are: you discover that your spaceship has inadvertently slipped across the event horizon of a black hole ? the boundary beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape the hole’s fearsome gravity. The only question is how you can maximize the time you have left. What do you do?
A common idea in physics is that you shouldn’t try to blast your way out of there. Black holes, it’s said, are like the popular view of quicksand: the harder you struggle, the worse things become.
But Geraint Lewis and Juliana Kwan of the University of Sydney in Australia say this is a myth. Their analysis of the problem, soon to be published in the/ Proceedings of the Astronomical Society of Australia, shows that in general your best bet is indeed to turn on the rocket’s engine. You’ll never escape, but you’ll live a little longer.
Falling into a black hole is a strange affair….
(Thanks to investigator Katherine Gleason for bringing this to our attention.)