system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
If light cannot escape from a black hole, wouldn't the objects being pulled in be going faster than the speed of light?
gpt
Sort of.... the thing is, you can't measure distances and speeds *globally*, i.e., looking at spacetime as a whole. From that standpoint they're dependent on the coordinates you choose. The only physical way of defining distance is *locally*. In other words, observers near each other can measure their distances, before they get so far apart that the effects of gravity (i.e., the curvature of spacetime) become important.

Locally, no speeds can ever go faster than light. But that's fine: inside a black hole, you'll never measure your neighbors exceeding that speed. From a local perspective, all speeds inside a black hole are below the speed of light.

*But*, when you look at those speeds from a global perspective (which you can only do theoretically, mathematically - it's not possible in practice), they all tend inwards towards the center of the black hole. No matter what direction you look like you're going locally, forwards or backwards, left or right, from the global point of view, *everything* inside the event horizon points inward towards the black hole.