The Black Hole

  No, I 'm not talking about being trapped in your home town, never really leaving except that one rare vacation to Vegas (a lame town btw, not as cool as Hangover might let you think, and no comp'ed drinks?  Sheesh!  I miss the '80s).  I'm talking 'bout the spacial anomaly, the neutron star.
  There's a few theorists on-board that believe that since light (particle or wave?  you decide) cannot escape closer than the event horizon that time itself is distorted by gravity enough that you will slow down and the universe and everything in it will move along at a faster rate.  The "event horizon" is an imaginary line where gravity is so strong that there are no particles that can escape at that point further.  The point of no return so-to-speak.

  There's been a few movies and shorts playing on that subject, and some extremely low-budget (or sadly, high-budget, ie. think the new Star Trek movie) that think that a black hole is really a "hole" based on uneducated writers who never got past elementary school science class.  It's not a "hole" per-se.  If Einstein had called it something else instead of a "hole" it'd really have helped-out writers.  He probably should have called it a "gravity star" or something like that, in its core a super-dense ball with a near-infinite gravity.  Ah, well.  Sorry J.J.Abrahms, you fail Junior High science class.  I guess you're a retard, and you owe me several hours of my life from your crappy ending of Lost.  Really?  They all end-up in Purgatory, waiting for Heaven to open-up?  Really?  The mom and the stone in the well was just.. magic?  No explanation with the Viking wheel's power?  Just.. magic?  I think it's "pistols at 20 paces" with you, Abrams!
  Anyway, there's a few little bits of movie and TV out there touching on being stationary at an event-horizon station, like a spaceship or space base or something.  One point is left-out though, and it bugs me.  Okay, so that's the point where light can't escape due to extreme gravity but if you're say, 10 feet off of that, isn't gravity still super strong?  Like, enough to crush everything?  Say the nose of your spaceship is facing it and you're somehow retro-thrusting away from the black hole near the event horizon (no, sci-fi writers, it can't just float there).  You'd need the retro-thrusters because the gravity at that point is not an on/off situation.  It's just extreme at that point.  10 feet off, heck even likely 10 million miles off it's still more than anything normally can withstand, far greater than 1g.  Probably at 10-feet off it's closer to a billion g-forces.  So, somehow you're retro-thrusting against it at that point, wouldn't the gravity be so strong all your stuff would smoosh-smoosh against the nose of the ship?  Wouldn't you be crushed as well?  Gravity there is probably 1 billion g's (minus say, one, so.. 999 million g's).  I don't care how good you are at push-ups, you won't survive, and your ship would crumple into a flat pancake, at which point your engines would be smoosh too and you'd just fall-in very fast now that you have no retro-thrust.

  Now, what if you have anti-gravity devices on-board somehow (these don't exist yet)?  Well, you'd have to generate 999 million anti-g-forces to survive in your ship.  There's a possibility we could devise engines that like the Hoover Dam's hydro-electric plant could use the gravity pull to generate engine power, perhaps with electro-capacitors insane enough to handle the energy needed and provided (we still can't harness lightning via capacitors yet).  I think it's hopeless.
  Or, I could try and watch Star Trek again and ignore the science and just have fun.  Maybe I could watch it on an iPhone.