“As you approach a black hole, you do not notice a change in time as you experience it, but from an outsider’s perspective, time appears to slow down and eventually crawl to a stop for you So who is right? This discrepancy, and whose reality is ultimately correct, is a highly contested area of current physics research.” In an article that recently appeared on “Quick And Dirty Tips” ( featured by SciAm), Everyday Einstein Sabrina Stierwalt explains: It might just take a few hundred billion years. If you take into account that black holes evaporate, it doesn’t quite take forever, and your friends will eventually see you vanishing. For an outside observer however, you seem to be moving slower and slower and will never quite reach the black hole, due to the (technically infinitely large) gravitational redshift. It takes you a finite time to reach the horizon of a black hole. You would, however, probably be torn apart before crossing the horizon of a solar-mass black hole. Leaving aside lots of hot gas and swirling particles, you have good chances to survive crossing the horizon of a supermassive black hole, like that in the center of our galaxy. The larger the mass, the smaller the space-time curvature at the horizon, and the smaller the tidal force. Whether this happens before or after you cross the horizon depends, again, on the mass of the black hole. It will stretch any extended object in a process with technical name “spaghettification.” That’s what will eventually kill you. The gravitational pull itself isn’t the problem, the problem is the change in the pull, the tidal force. The difference is that, since a black hole doesn’t have a surface, the gravitational pull can continue to increase as you approach the center. At a fixed distance from the center, it isn’t any stronger or weaker than that of a star with the same mass. The gravitational pull of a black hole depends on its mass. If you fall into a black hole, you’ll die.