We take for granted the inexorable march of scientific inquiry with which we have grown up (my generation and the two before me). There have been in history huge forces which have stifled inquiry.
In the sixth century BCE and for some three hundred years after, Greeks developed a mathematics than enabled them to chart the stars, work out that the earth was round and even (through a mistake that cancelled itself out in the equation) get close to its actual circumference. As Carl Sagan suggested in his seminal series Cosmos, if they had not been ignored by the emerging merchant classes and desires of empire resulting ultimately in invasion by the might of Rome, the twentieth century might have been the century we launched the first inter-stellar space ships.
The Christian Church with its insistence on the sanctity of the human body would not even allow the rudimentary brain surgery practiced by the Egyptians who knew trepanning (they even found one mummy with a plate in its head suggesting they attempted radical brain surgery or their wives threw their dishes really hard!)
The Chinese were making water clocks two thousand years ago before their Emperors became paranoid.
Scientific advancement has been stopped by the most ludicrous of things, human foibles, and today we use the excuse that there isn’t the money to afford the experiments. How many thousands of years are we losing today for that excuse.