Susskind (and many others) have missed a very interesting analogy between a black hole and going through a corner while driving a car. If you enter a corner too fast while driving a car, you may survive for most of the way through the corner, only to be catapulted into the air at the very end. If you "solve" a corner backwards, you can compute ahead of time the maximum speed at which you can enter the corner and still survive; that is your "critical velocity", or equivalently, your event horizon. You won't feel anything any different when entering the corner at too high a speed, but you won't be able to exit in one piece no matter how hard you brake and or attempt to steer out of the corner. There's an old joke about the difference between racing a front-engine vs a rear-engine car: you still go over the edge in the corner, only in one case you go over forwards, while in the other you go over backwards. At 10:36 AM 10/20/2013, Keith F. Lynch wrote:
Right. You could survive a fall through the event horizon of a quiescent galactic-mass black hole. (Of course you wouldn't survive for long after that, as you approached the singularity. Nor could you avoid the singularity.)