Earth Day

Every Spring, frogs take over my neighborhood.

Each night, their croaking is loud and constant. It's an amphibian Tinder run amok.

It reminds me of when a grade teacher asked me to bring in some tadpoles. If they had lived, they would have been 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 became the stuff of a Stephen King novel.

Let’s say Jim woos 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 underachiever and not a showoff.

Now, if all these tadpoles also listened to the Almighty, each female would produce 3,000 tadpoles yearly.

And this keeps going 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 will be about 15.238 quintillion frogs. Minus a few Kermits that got hit by cars.

If each frog is 2 inches tall and you stack 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 stacking those bad boys for two more years, you could go back and forth to the nearest galaxy nine million 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 proportions. In 6 years, every square inch of dry land would be covered with a pile of 199 frogs. In the following year, the mound will be 4.7 miles high.

Enough about frogs.

God only spoke to Adam and Eve.

If the human population continues to grow at the rate it has for the last 70 years, by 2095, there will be 22.9 billion of us. Now, that’s way too many, but if you stacked us all up, we would only get 25.5% of the way to the sun.