So Luckless won't actually fall in then, until the end of time? For Luckless, it's just a minute or so, however for visitors nearby, another person can flyby and see him sitting just above the event horizon, and a billion years later, yet another (somewhat evolved hopefully) person can flyby and also see Luckless still easing on into ...that black hole.
Sort of. As Luckless falls down the hole, light gets further and further shifted to the red end of the spectrum - down past red, infrared, microwave, radio, and further. Eventually (actually, pretty quickly by our standards) it'll be shifted down to the point where we cannot detect it.
And we are not doing SETI searches around Black holes, why? exactly?....
Aside from jonsey's excellent demonstration you mean?
We can add to jonesy, by the way, by noting that small black holes have nasty tidal forces near their event horizons - the fact that your clock ticks slowly is not a comfort as you are turned into spaghetti. Really big black holes don't have that problem, but they are generally found in the center of galaxies - very busy places, even harder to find small things in them.
If some critter wants to see the end of the Universe, it might crawl down into the gravity well of a black hole to wait it out, sure. But in order to get a message out as, say, a radio wave, it would have to emit it as gamma rays or other high-energy electromagnetic radiation.
And the clock differential presents a data transfer rate problem. Their time is very slow compared to ours. What seems like a screaming high rate of data transmission looks like a crawl to us. If your entire life goes by in what they see as a fraction of a second, you aren't going to get much data from them.
Also... if we are really on our way to the beginning of time instead of the end of time (As people commonly believe), it would mean Luckless is on his way to the beginnings of creation, yes?
Being on our way to the beginning of time isn't one of the common theories.
Does all this mean that nothing ever actually has fallen into a black hole? No matter how much stuff a black hole has sucked towards it, none of it has yet crossed the (any) event horizon?
There are some unanswered questions of quantum effects - in a classical view, we out here would say they never reach the event horizon, Zeno's paradox style. However, quantum mechanics may provide a way for them to finally pop over the edge when we aren't looking.
