If I fall into an evaporating black hole, where do I end up?

A few things:

1)Just because an observer crossing the event horizon doesn't necessarily feel ill effects AT THE TIME OF CROSSING the horizon, it doesn't mean that they won't inevitably end up at the singularity, where there will be plenty of ill effects--all timelike curves that cross the horizon end up at the singularity in a finite amount of proper time. For a particle falling into a non-spinning black hole, it's actually the same amount of proper time that it would take to fall into a Newtonian point mass.

2) You have to be very careful about what you mean by 'horizon' in the case of a black hole that eventually evaporates. There are several definitions of 'horizon', and depending on how you resolve the singularity, and upon how the hole evaporates these different definitions can differ in meaning--the most common difference is the apparent horizon-a 'point at which, for this given time, you can't go back', and the event horizon--'the point at which, you MUST end up at the singularity'. It might be possible that your evaporating black hole spacetime may have an apparent horizon but no event horizon, for instance. In that case, the whole paradox goes away.

3) A careful answer of this requires the careful drawing of a Penrose-Carter diagram of the relevant spacetime. If you managed to tweak it somehow so that you fell in, blasted your rockets for long enough to outlive the recontraction of the horizon, the short answer is that you wouldn't receive all of the information about all of the future, just that determined by the "null past" of the horizon--you would find out about all of the lightlike and timelike rays that fell into the horizon, but not those that would head toward the spot where the horizon used to be at times later than when the horizon was there.


There is an ongoing research regarding your question and some solutions have been proposed. I recommend

  • http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0609024
  • http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0701096
  • http://arxiv.org/abs/1011.2219

In short, it is proposed that the internal energy of infalling observer is fully transformed into kinetic energy and then into radiation. This radiation is called "pre-Hawking" radiation. Although there are some counter-arguments.


My understanding is that a freely falling observer who falls into a black hole won't see any future date arrive at a distant point before crossing the event horizon. I think that's true only for an accelerating observer who hovers ever closer to a horizon.