Almost all environments, suitably primed, could play host to knowledge creation. Even in the vacuum of space you could feasibly hoover up hydrogen atoms and transmute them into a space station. This space-station could then start receiving evidence about the universe by the light of the stars around it, while also performing physics experiments, generating new streams of knowledge.
We would normally regard a lunar colony, even after it has become self-sufficient, as having originated on Earth. But what, exactly, will have originated on Earth? In the long run, all its atoms have originated on the moon (or the asteroids). All the energy that it uses has originated in the sun. Only some proportion of its knowledge came from Earth, and, in the hypothetical case of a perfectly isolated colony, that would be a rapidly dwindling proportion.