How an Engineer Finds God in Nature

Seth Nickell is an engineer. It’s his job to look at nature from an analytical and data-driven point of view. But through the numbers, he is able to find God in His creation and see that “God is love.”

Video Transcript

Oakland, CA

How does an engineer find God in nature?

Seth Nickell: This stuff’s amazing. This is jasmine. Let me get a little. I mean I think it’s fascinating actually that we have flowers that have all these scents. The scent reminds you that there is another world. It’s the agricultural season, so basically all the analysts are at work analyzing farm fields and looking at imagery that we flew over.

Series imaging designs little camera systems that can watch plants breathe while you fly them in airplanes over them. So we make these camera pods that are really pretty and then we fly over agricultural fields and farms and orchards. When the plant’s breathing, the temperature of its skin is slightly cooler than when the plants not breathing. Because the way a plant breathes, it actually releases water vapor when it does photosynthesis. We can actually watch that from the sky.

Seth is the Vice President of Engineering for Ceres Imaging.

Seth: I’m the VP of Engineering, and I run the people that build the cameras and design the cameras and all the programming for the scientific processing. And then we also build a web and mobile application that customers can view their imagery in.

Seth realized his desire to be even closer to nature. So he’s going to work remotely in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas.

Seth: Coming down here was definitely a crucial journey. I’m really happy to be going back to the mountain. But I’m also in a weird way a little scared to leave the city. People provide an anchor.

See the balloon?

Sierra Nevadas

When I read love thy neighbor as thy self, I think “as” as in equals. Your neighbor equals yourself. It’s about not building barriers between yourself and others. It’s recognizing that your neighbor and yourself are both reflections of the same thing.

I think love is a very basic thing. That God is love.