I'll begin by stating that I I don't support such a mission, as I prefer robotic exploration. But this proposal isn't as extreme as it may sound - it's probably a heck of a lot easier than landing on a planet and taking off. It's only 640 m/s from earth escape to Venus (3/5ths that of Mars). Transit time is less and launch windows a lot more frequent. Venus offers very easy aerocapture. You don't have to deal with the randomness of the surface - your "landing" is a lot more forgiving. Your habitat is probably simpler, not having to deal with a surface (although there's a few potential complications that need to be studied, such as storms, and I don know the radiation level at the desired altitude). Keeping it aloft is easy - even normal earth air is a lifting gas on Venus. Solar energy arriving at Venus is double that of Earth. Nearly earth's gravity eliminates a lot of the uncertanties about skeletal and muscular wasting.

One of the neat things is that a person could potentially step outside without any sort of special suit, just an oxygen mask. It's a "maybe", though, as there's a few complicating factors. It's 37C (100F) at the same sort of heights that it's about 600mb; for US analogies, it's Phoenix temperatures at Mount Whitney air pressures (lower or higher for both, depending on your exact altitude - you can choose). So it's not a perfect match - but probably tolerable. But there's two potential complicating gases: SO2/sulfuric acid and carbon monoxide. Breathing them is right out, but even long-term (hours at a time) skin exposure might be problematic at the given concentrations; it's not certain whether at these altitudes they'd be prohibitive. They would however make eye protection a must at the very least, the eyes are more sensitive to both CO and SO2 than the skin.

Manned or not, the main advantage of a Venus blimp would be the lower altitude it would provide to scientific equipment versus satellites. So you'll get a lot more information on the atmosphere, which could help answer questions about Venus's evolution (and how other worlds in other systems might be). You'll get higher resolution radar imaging of the surface. You simplify to some extent sample return missions from the surface, as each sample collection doesn't have to be a self contained return mission. Etc.

One thing on Venus I'd love to see studied more is the super-reflective radar surfaces. It's now believed to be due to a "galena snow", snow made of shiny, electrically conductive lead sulfide. I'd really love to know more about the surface minerology of Venus in general.

True - my uncle lives in Florida and says most of them vote republican on the abortion issue alone (i.e. Catholic church influence) even if their dirt poor and on food stamps and the republicans tend to take those programs away. He's glad they do, as well, because it lets him keep more money. For reference, this is a very rich uncle and he can probably afford significantly higher taxes (which are all on investments these days - he retired a multimillionaire when he was 54 or 55, so he could spend more time doing things he loves, like traveling the world).

Once again, when not using made up numbers, Green energies are the same.

Which is a very odd claim - since you produce no numbers whatsoever for "green" energy.

And you forget that natural gas isn't just a source of BTU's - it's also a major feedstock for a variety of industrial processes. (A significant portion of "oil derived" plastics are actually derived from natural gas.)

No, I missed the quoting the part that was (more-or-less, mostly less) correct. The parts I quoted were parts that you were wildly incorrect on, as there's considerable distance between what has been tested, and what they are testing. Even so, you're still wrong. Miss the target, by even a little bit, and it's a loss. Land hard and lose the vehicle (not due to sea state) and it's a loss. Tip over and lose the vehicle and damage or lose the barge (not due to sea state), and it's a loss.

So yes, it does matter if they miss, it does matter if they land hard or tip over - because the whole goal of the test is to demonstrate a successful pinpoint landing. You don't really seem to grasp what's being tested here and why.

However, the cost of not having to rebuild the rocket every time is much more significant. Even if they can only reuse it a few times, that's a lot of production cost being saved.

The money saved by not having to produce a new vehicle is offset by the money spent on fixed infrastructure and on recovering and refurbishing the vehicle for the next flight. Airline travel is as a cheap as it is because they've gotten between-flights maintenance down to essentially zero (basically only emergent work) - the expensive refurbishment and refitting occurs at intervals of months to years. (And the amortized costs of the facilities for doing so are spread over a large number of aircraft and a very large number of flights.) The Shuttle was expensive as it was because between-flights maintenance costs were very high. (And the amortized costs of the infrastructure were spread over a very small number of vehicles and small number of flights.)
 
So, if a first stage (new-in-box) costs $x million and refurbishment costs $.9x million (including the amortized portion of the fixed costs), then it'll have to fly ten times just to break even. The break even point calculation is very sensitive to flight rate, flight interval, and the number of vehicles in the fleet. The hope is, over a long time frame, to reach civil aviation levels... but there's a long way to go between here and there. (Particularly in light of the low flight rate of F9 launches that have sufficient spare payload capacity to allow them to be recovered.)

If they can show over a couple attempts that they get close to the target then they can move to doing this over land. They have already proven they can do this in Texas many times.

There's a reason why they're flying all these attempts over water - they haven't done it in Texas even so much as once. The flights in Texas have been "take off, go a short distance up, then land more-or-less right back where you started" - which isn't the difficult part (so far as flight control is concerned, it's more of an engine control problem) as small errors have no time to propagate. The difficult part (from the flight control POV and the reason they are testing on a barge) is the boostback and retro burns, where even small errors in attitude and delta V propagate into significant errors by the time you hit your hovering gates (and is thus an engine control *and* a flight control problem). Another issue, also not tested in Texas, is the aerodynamics and flight dynamics of the returning stage (especially in the high speed regime), and indeed these issues caused a problem on the first attempt.

So no, coming close isn't a win. They're going to have to demonstrate pinpoint recovery a number of times before anyone is going to let them even consider attempting it over land.

I'm not talking about ideals, or tourism, or saving the world, or finding anything "up there", or anything of that nature (did you even read what I wrote?). I'm talking about the sheer awesomeness of, at your whim, shooting up a 1500 tonne rocket into orbit then landing it on an automated oceanic platform. It's like playing Kerbal with a real-life 70-meter tall rocket. Why don't more billionaires do stuff like that if only just for the fun of it?

But clearly you have an axe to grind against something for some reason, so I'll let you get back to that wheel.

Why don't more billionaires do stuff like this?

I'm not saying do it "for the benefit of humanity", or even "for a profit". Just simply.... if you have billions of dollars, and you want to spend it on something, what can you possibly spend it on that wins in a sheer awesomeness category as "shooting a gigantic rocket up into orbit and then landing it on a robot boat in the middle of the ocean"? That's like a freaking video game, played with 1500 tonnes of aluminum and highly combustible fuel.

Back in the day, Dr. Dobbs was giving the world invaluable stuff like Mode X. Your average programmer had to be a lot more connected with the hardware, and working with the hardware was somewhat of a black art. Nowadays there's still some black art stuff out there for getting good performance (even a lot of simple, important stuff is inexplicably obscure... I bet you that 90% of C/C++ programmers don't even know what the restrict keyword does, for example), and you still see the occasional inner loop of some high performance code use assembly, but that's not the general case.

Usually most aging-preventing discoveries cause cancer. For example, the p21 knockout mice that gained almost salamander-like regeneration also gained a high tumor rate. Usually processes in your body involving the stopping of growth and areas dying off are things that help prevent cancer from forming or growing.

Scientists involved in the discoveries have been cautious, saying that the features could also be floating debris or bubbles

Um, wouldn't those things be even more awesome? Trust me, I won't be disappointed if there's geological activity causing bubbling from under the seas (heat plus organics!), or if there's floating objects (cryopumice / super fluffy snow? organics foams? something else? what the heck floats on methane, after all?)

Probably not, but the hydrocarbon cycle on Titan is still very poorly understood. I really look forward to the next Titan mission, but unfortunately everyone's obsessed with Europa so the next launch window is almost certainly going to be missed and it'll be decades before a new spacecraft gets there. The presence of seas and the low gravity plus a dense atmosphere leaves one with a plethora of great exploration options (all nuclear powered, of course, there's essentially no sunlight): hydrogen blimp (it's noncombustible on Titan) (with or without propulsion), hot air or hot hydrogen blimp (it takes surprisingly little heat there to get lift), hybrid blimp / lifting body aircraft, helicopter, fixed wing aircraft, tilt wing aircraft, boat, hybrid aircraft / boat (with any other aircraft design), etc.

My favorite design (although probably the most expensive) would be a tilt wing aircraft with floating landing gear for either surface or sea landings. You get the high speed travel and freedom of motion of a fixed wing aircraft so you can cover the whole planet, but you can land anywhere, do science for a day or so while you recharge your flight batteries (so you don't need a huge RTG or reactor), then take off again for the next location. The view from the air (whether optical or radar) of the previous day's hop would be used by the ground team to figure out where to have it go for the next day.

I'll take a truckload, I need something to insulate my house with.

They worded it poorly, as the seas are methane, which is not oil - on earth it's the prime component of natural gas, so the better term would simply be "hydrocarbons". That said, hydrocarbons do not need life to form - just hydrogen, carbon, and a shortage of any oxidizers that could break them down into the lower energy states of H2O and CO2. Even longer chain hydrocarbons can form naturally - on Titan, that happens in the upper atmosphere by photochemical reactions.

It's important not to overgeneralize Earth to other celestial bodies. For example, you can even have bodies with oxygen atmospheres without life. We see this (to a tiny extent) on Europa, which has an extremely thin oxygen atmosphere from photolysis of water ice. It's quite possible that in other systems there could be an environment that produces a denser O2 atmosphere through a similar process - or through other processes, both known or not yet conceived of.

The universe is a weird place. Think about what a tidally locked rocky planet orbiting close to its parent star would experience. I read about one planet whose night side temperature was expected to be earthlike but with a hot side temperature of thousands of degrees. So think about it for a second, what's going to happen? The hot side is going to constantly boil off, potentially even to plasma, be circulated around to the cold side, and then rain down rock. Rockstorms. Depending on the properties of the rock, the rate of boil-off, the rate of redistribution, and the properties of the atmosphere, it could be anywhere from dust to large chunks, and anything from volcanic-like ash to pele's hair (rock wool) to breccias to gemstones. Lightning would be tremendous, like in some volcanic eruptions. Given the amount of energy at hand, winds in storms could get up to ridiculous intensities. The redistribution of mass is going to cause a continual planetary slump from the cold side to the hot side, so one would expect frequent, super-intense earthquakes and frequent volcanic eruptions. You might get some intense magnetic effects via an exceptionally strong dynamo effect, plus the star's magnetic field itself would be orders of magnitude stronger. Aurora could be intense enough to light the sky on the cold side and power photosynthesis. Aurora could be intense enough to light the sky and power photosynthesis on the cold side. Liquid water would be stable in certain places (if it managed not to be all blown off over geological timescales, that is, the planet would have to be large), but would be thrashed about to biblical extends by the other aforementioned processes. If the magnetic fields are strong enough, flowing saltwater may even be visibly dragged by Lorentz forces and build up charges when constrained. The dissociation of the rock on the hot side would free up oxygen into the atmosphere, which would not be all immediately consumed on the cold side (some oxidation reactions are slow). And on and on. So it's potentially possible to have livable, breathable planet with a soil made from regular rains of rock wool and gemstones, lit by aurorae and in a constantly undergoing one catastrophe after the next.

Yes, being white has huge advantages.

First, you can become as educated as you want without facing racial slurs and attacks from people of your own color.

You can speak in regular English without facing the same ridicule as above.

You can react to other races with courtesy and respect, again without the above negative consequences.

You have the freedom to not violently attack old people, children, anyone caught alone, and females without being thought of by your peers as weak and deserving of physical attack yourself.

You have the freedom of a wide selection of role models from a young age, many of whom are not in any way involved in criminal activity, misogyny, and/or drug use; and who are not advocating for these things.

You have the freedom of selecting a political party without reprisals from your contemporaries. And you have the added benefit of the respect of both political parties. This is mainly due to the fact that you haven't idiotically ignored institutionalized abuse by the party you overwhelmingly vote for, while actively alienating the other party, which has resulted in almost complete political sterilization for your entire racial group.

Yes, you are 100% right when you say that being white is a big benefit. However, the greatest portion of that benefit comes not from being white, but from not being black.