Recycling

Did you learn in school, that every real process is irreversible? Due to friction and other awkward stuff, energy will degenerate. This might be true, but did you calculate how much you lose? *) There is a myth of the increasing entropy of the universe. Stay calm! It is not growing that fast. 'Heat death' will wait some hundred billion years.
During that time we will be able to contiue our research. Just now we know only 5% of the matter. The rest is 'dark'. Maybe the freezing world is not inevitable, after all.
Some processes are approximately reversible, and the amount of increasing entropy is negligible.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe

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*)
Strain out a gnat

If the system has a termal energy=1 J, then the entropy could be distributed like this: S as function of T (T=[1; 373] K)

If temperature increases 100 K, the entropy will increase by 0,04. We have greater obstacles in the world. "You strain out a gnat, but swollow a camel."