Earth Day

Every Spring frogs rule my neighborhood.

Each night their croaking is loud and constant. It is an amphibian Tinder run amuck.

It reminds me of when a grade schoolteacher asked me to bring in some tadpoles. If they had lived, they would be about 61 years old this year. I hope they have had good lives and planned well for their retirement.

Give me a second while I jump to the book of Genesis, where God told Adam and Eve: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it…”

What if God said that to the first frog couple, Jim and Bonnie?

What would happen if all the eggs of one pair of frogs lived and became parents too.  What if all the subsequent generations were fruitful and multiplied?

I did the math and within a few years this turns into the stuff of a Steven King novel.

Let’s say Jim woes Bonnie with his deep throbbing croak and after a nice meal, they get down to business.  Assume Bonnie is a common North American frog, and after 1 to 3 weeks (depending on the water temperature) she spews out 3,000 eggs.  It could range from 1,000 to 6,000, but Bonnie is a thoroughly average frog. She’s not an under achiever and not a showoff.

Now if all these tadpoles also listened to the Almighty, and each female produce 3,000 tadpoles a year.

And this keeps on happening for years.

We’ve got to acknowledge that frogs only live a few years.  So, each mating pair only has babies for 2 years before they succumb to the inevitable and move on to that great swamp in the sky.

In 5 years, there are about 15.238 quintillion frogs.  Minus a few Kermits that got hit by cars.

If each frog is 2 inches tall and you stacked them all up (you might need some super glue, which seems gruel, but still kinder than a huge frog kabab), the pile would be a hair over 481 quadrillion miles tall, or about 81.82 light years.

If you kept on stacking those bad boys for 2 more years you could go back and forth to the nearest galaxy 9,000,000 times.

After another year you could cross the entire universe almost 3 times.

Ok it’s silly to stack frogs.  So, what if they just stayed on Earth?

That would be a housing crisis of biblical proportion.  In 6 years, every square inch of dry land would be covered with a pile of 199 frogs.  In the next year the mound would be 4.7 miles high.

Enough about frogs.

God only spoke to Adam and Eve.

If the population of humans keeps growing at the rate we have for the last 70 years, in 2095 there will be 22.9 billion of us.  Now that’s clearly way too many, but if you stacked us all up, we would only get 25.5% of the way to the sun.

All the frogs would laugh at us.