Uh, it can, and does, and already has? We just don't find the answer particularly satisfying emotionally, so we aren't investing much effort to read it out more deeply.

The universe isn't intrinsically meaningful. There is very little doubt about this. There is no "meaning of life" except allegorically.

As living creatures, our purpose, inasmuch as there is a purpose, is to help perpetuate ourselves. "Purpose" is a fancy high-level construct that evolved to help the process. There is really no doubt about this.

It's not beyond our epistemic horizon at all. We're smack in the middle of it, all the time. It's hard to perceive not because it's too far away, but because we're so embedded within it that we can't easily imagine what things would be like otherwise. It's like air, not Shangri-La.

(Note: "perpetuate ourselves", in social creatures like us, with relatively high intragroup genetic diversity and relatively low intergroup genetic diversity, does not mean "have lots of children". Our strategy is one of cooperation and mutual success, not, mostly, high individual fecundity.)

None of this was terribly clear a hundred years ago. However, I don't think a modern science-based outlook can lead anywhere else. This still gives a tremendous amount of flexibility as to details, and lots of open questions (e.g. is there in any reasonable sense an objective measure of what our responsibility is to other types of life, or even to our own in extraordinary circumstances where the normal pragmatic assessment of cooperation being by far the best strategy breaks down?). But we know the general shape of the answer.