Can Humans Survive Near a Black Hole's Event Horizon?

[xantox]

Yes, we do, but remember also that some choices of coordinates will not cover the entire manifold, so you have to be very careful talking about the values of those coordinates for events outside the portion of the manifold they cover. For example, the "ship coordinates" you're using do not cover the entire manifold, in either version (Rindler coordinates in Minkowski spacetime or Schwarzschild coordinates in Schwarzschild spacetime).

Sure, those coordinates only allow to map the limit of the horizon crossing and not the horizon crossing itself.

 

[stevebd1]

On the subject of hovering near the event horizon, the force required would be-

|F|= \frac{Gm}{r^2} \left(\sqrt{1-\frac{2M}{r}\right)^{-1/2}

where M= Gm/c^2

As hovering in a gravitational field is synonymous with accelerating in flat space, this means regardless of if you’d found a BH where the tidal forces won’t kill you (for BH >4.6e+4 sol, tidal forces at EH are <1g), if you were to ‘become stationary’ anywhere near the EH, the simple force of gravity (or g-force) would.

For example, an intermediate static BH with a mass of 6e+5 sol and a radius (2M) of 1.77e+6 km, the closest coordinate radius you could hover at comfortably (g=Earth g) would be at r=2.85e+9 km (~3200M), nearly 3 billion km from the black hole! If we consider 10g being the maximum a human could tolerate for a period of time, then you could hover at r=9e+8 km (~1000M). Some military electrical equipment can withstand 15,000g, say we have electrical equipment that can withstand 100,000g, the closest this equipment would get is approx. r=9.45e+6 km (~11M).

This is backed up to some extent by the following web page-
http://www.aei.mpg.de/einsteinOnline/en/spotlights/descent_bh/index.html