The best thing with local and short-term effects is that eventually someone finds the way to extend the space and time boundaries a bit, then a bit more and then we are talking about astronomical scale.

Can be a nice story plot for a sci-fi book, in which science finds the way to defer the rise of enthropy to some almost infinitely distant moment in future (that end of time, we've always being expecting) and move the boundaries of locality to the observable universe. What a world that would be.