Story 3: Scenario 1. I'm looking out at the universe from the Earth, and in every direction I see a red shift which is larger, the "further away" it is. I conclude that I am in an expanding universe. Scenario 2. I'm looking out at the universe from the Earth, but at some very large distance from Earth, there is a gigantic black hole, which bends _all_ the light that I see, so that no matter in which direction from Earth I look, I'm actually seeing the same black hole, but from different directions. Furthermore, objects & radiation going into this black hole become red-shifted due to the enormous gravity of the black hole. How do I tell these two scenarios apart? Does it even matter; perhaps they are equivalent? I got this idea by considering what our universe looks like to Joe as he approaches the black hole; the black hole actually fills up _more_ than 50% of the sky, due to the bending of the light rays. Just before Joe falls in, the black hole fills up 99.9% of Joe's sky, and the universe that he's exiting looks like a very distant black hole to him. At 12:25 PM 5/27/2012, Warren Smith wrote:

Joe jumps into a Schwarzschild black hole. Mary stays behind and watches him fall.

The standard stories are then as follows: 1. Joe, in finite time as measured by his wristwatch (say 1 hour for concreteness), falls into the center of the black hole and is crushed into a point, albeit if it is a large enough black hole then tides will be small enough that he will still be alive for some time after entering the horizon. The horizon crossing for Joe is just a normal moment, nothing special happens at that moment.

2. Mary, however, sees Joe getting closer and closer to the horizon (and redder and redder) but according to her view Joe never enters the horizon, never is crushed, never dies.