system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
When we say that nothing, not even light, can escape a black hole, does that just mean nothing that we currently know exists? is it concievable that something could have physical properties that would allow it to escape from the gravity of a black hole?
gpt
Saying "light can't escape" a black hole is true, but it doesn't really capture the reality of what's going on.

A black hole is a region in spacetime with so much mass concentrated into such a small volume that it warps space and time to the point where they essentially switch places. Outside, in the normal, flat-ish universe, space is a fixed coordinate grid, and time flows inexorably forwards. Inside a black hole, time stops, and *space* flows unstopably towards the singularity.

Put another way, the singularity isn't a point in space at the "center" of a black hole, it is a point in the future. The event horizon is defined as the radius within which all of your possible futures end at the singularity. Once you are within the event horizon, *there is no direction you can turn which is out*. All directions are in, towards the singularity in your future. In fact, if your goal is to survive as long as possible, your best move is just to free fall. Because the singularity is in every direction, any attempt to accelerate in any direction only gets you there sooner than had you done nothing at all. There is literally no way out without going backwards in time.

With this being said, it is difficult to envision any object with properties that allow it to escape, unless it inherently travels backward in time, which tends to violate cause and effect, and so is not generally expected to exist.