Dear Tanmay:
Thank you for your essay. I'm sorry that I missed it before, but I'm really glad now that I've read it. I agree with you about black stars, and I think that taking accurate and consistent account of descriptions according to preferred observers will provide the correct path to a quantum theory of gravity. As such, I particularly liked and agreed with your paragraph that begins ``Just as Newton's first law defines inertial frames...''. I think the analogy to Newton's first and second laws is appropriate. Special relativity theory does retain the special status of *all* inertial observers that was given in Newton's theory, which, together with the light postulate, leads to such effects as the relativity of simultaneity and block space-time. In contrast, I think that for reasons of causal coherence, similar to the ``networking'' you've described in your essay, the right ``first law'' for quantum gravity should distinguish a particular set of inertial observers as preferred, whose clocks all measure a Cosmic time. In my essay, I've described how special relativity would need to be re-interpreted within this context, but the interpretation of the theory that I've drawn there should extend to general solutions in a way that is, I think, entirely relevant to your argument here. I sincerely hope you'll read my essay, because there's so much that I'd like to discuss with you.
In hopes that you do, I'll add two paragraphs to briefly describe my thoughts. Given a three-dimensional universe that endures with absolute cosmic time (as relativity theory can be interpreted to describe in many solutions), a black hole cannot be said to be created through gravitational collapse through the Schwarzschild (coordinate) singularity, r_Sch, in finite cosmic time. In the Schwarzschild solution, an observer at r=infty should measure cosmic time there, and for that reason I think it's already wrong to conclude that particles can cross r_Sch in finite cosmic time. Now, while I think slices of constant Schwarzschild t should not be constant cosmic time slices, but that t should only describe cosmic time at r=infty (my reason should hopefully become clear below), thinking of them as such proves quite illustrative. Please consider an Eddington-Finkelstein diagram, interpreted so that slices of constant *Schwarzschild* t describe the universe outside a spherical star at values of constant cosmic time. This means that an event at r_1>r_Sch is said to occur ``simultaneously'' with an event at r_2>r_Sch if they both lie on the slice t=const.---and this, even though they are not ``synchronous'' in Eddington-Finkelstein coordinates; i.e., they don't occur at the same value of the timelike coordinate in this frame. Commonly, one used to interpret the infall of a body in this frame in the following way: one observer leaves another at some r_O>r_Sch and heads towards the black hole while the other remains fixed at r_O. At some finite time the infalling observer crosses r_Sch, and eventually reaches the singularity at r=0, while the outside observer remains forever at r_O. This description assumes that in this frame everything ``happens'' along the horizontal ``synchronous'' slices in the diagram. But if Schwarzschild t is interpreted as the absolute cosmic time everywhere, the description is very different: as the infalling observer approaches r_Sch, both he and his friend evolve coherently along slices of Schwarzschild t, so that eventually, when he reaches r_Sch, his friend is not ``beside'' him, at the same value of Eddington-Finkelstein time, but is himself at t=infty. Whatever happens after that, happens after the end of t.
I think there is an analogous consideration to be made in the case of de Sitter space. Please consider the two figures I've attached below, which illustrate statical coordinates of de Sitter space, from r=-r_h to r=+r_h (where r_h is the horizon radius; the radial coordinate r is actually imaginary beyond r_h), on a two-dimensional slice of de Sitter space in 3D Minkowski space. Slices of constant t are drawn in black and worldlines of constant r are drawn in red (please excuse my re-use of coordinates r and t in the statical line-element of de Sitter space). There are many different cosmological coordinations of de Sitter space that one may choose from, such as the line-element of the Steady State theory or the three-sphere that contracts to a finite radius and then expands, as I've mentioned in my essay---but the statical coordinates do not describe a cosmological model. Even so, a clock at the geodesic at r=0 in these coordinates does measure cosmic time. So let's consider the universe (the enduring three-sphere) that's described by the coherent bundle of similar geodesics around the hyperboloid: from the perspective of the observer at r=0 who uses statical de Sitter coordinates (r and t) to describe local space-time, other comoving cosmological geodesics *enter* the patch described by those coordinates at some *finite negative cosmic time* (i.e., finite negative T in the line-element given in Eq. (3) in my essay) at t=-infty. These geodesics move inwards along r until T=0, and then move outwards, eventually crossing the null line t=+infty at *finite positive cosmic time*. When this happens, they cross a causal horizon, and will never again be able to communicate with the observer at r=0. Even so, there is a very important point:---no timelike worldline that intersects r less than r_h at any t can ever cross the coordinate singularity r=r_h which lies at the intersection of two null lines connected to the central observer at T=-infty and T=+infty. It's inconsistent to interpret particles that cross the cosmological event horizon in this solution as crossing r=r_h, and moving out along r faster than the speed of light. In fact, the coordinate r loses all meaning at r=r_h, where it becomes imaginary.
For similar reasons, I think it's got to be wrong to describe the r-coordinate in Schwarzschild's solution as continuously real across the coordinate singularity, r_Sch, and thus describe that as an event horizon. Analogous to the statical de Sitter line-element, Schwarzschild's solution is given with respect to the asymptotic observer, who measures cosmic time, and who can never see anything that exists beyond r=r_Sch. And just as in the case of de Sitter space, I think it's wrong to say that any timelike observer can move in the r direction and actually reach r_Sch.
By the way, someone went through the top-rated essays while I was writing this and gave us all scores of 1. I've just given your essay a deserving rating in hopes of combatting that. I hope you'll consider rating my essay too, if you manage to read it in time. I haven't discussed its content here, but something of a consequence of the description of time I've argued for in the third section.
Best of luck,
Daryl