I like that and the same analogy would work pretty well for science too except that there are safeguards to prevent some of that out-of-bounds growth. But some of the early fits and starts show a progression.
Here is a more challenging extension: one spurious direction of growth for science is scientism and the very vocal few who feel it is their mission to argue that science must bring down religion. Science has led to a widely held belief that material is the most basic of things and everything else must be explained in terms of how whatever else is proposed can be justified in terms of the physics. This leads to the other popularly held opinion among the atheists I have encountered online that if our knowledge of all the atoms and other particles were more complete we could chart out the rest of history (determinism).
I recently watched most of video of an online discussion titled " The Nature of Reality: A Dialogue Between a Buddhist Scholar and a Theoretical Physicist" in which Sean Carroll whose science writing I have enjoyed in Endless Forms Most Beautiful seems intent on making an argument over what could have been an interesting discussion. But how does he justify thinking his knowledge entitles him to rule on what is or is not a part of reality or what would constitute an adequate theory of mind based on particle physics? This is painful to watch but there is a slice from 47:30 to 52:50 which would give you the flavor,
The comment in the first minute of that segment about the soon to be lost opportunity to have a discussion about the nature of reality - because, obviously, he expects science to exhaust that topic sometime soon. Weird.