There are schools that teach Go intensively from an early age, so that a 10-year-old student from one of those schools is already far better than a casual player like me will ever be, and it just keeps going up from there. People don't seem to get tired of it.

Every time I contemplate that, I wish all the talent thus spent, could be spent instead on schools providing similarly intensive teaching in something useful like science and engineering. What could be accomplished if you taught a few thousand smart kids to be dan-grade scientists by age 10 and kept going from there? I think it would be worth finding out.