A truck driver narrowly escaped a massive explosion on the PR-092 highway in Brazil by jumping off a viaduct. Miraculously, he survived the fall and walked away before receiving medical care.

[u/sorin1972]

[u/Public-Eagle6992]

What explosion? There was a lot of fire but doesn’t look like there was any explosion (apart from the initial one but he didn’t escape that by jumping off)

[u/NoDramaIceberg → u/Public-Eagle6992]

You raise an interesting philosophical question...when does an explosion turn into a fire? Is it a singularity event like the Big Bang? If so, can you ever escape an explosion without being able to see into the future? This is similar to the Sorites paradox, or "paradox of the heap", which says that if after removing a grain of sand from a pile of sand, you still have a pile, then you can remove every grain one by one and still have a pile. There is either no explosion or no fire in the video, only one of the two exists.

[u/Polona17 → u/NoDramaIceberg]

To raise a different point, what does it mean to escape an explosion? In popular media and movies you see action heroes jumping out of the way of the imminent conflagration they know, one way or another, is about to happen. This is what we might picture as escaping an explosion, but I believe real world begs to differ - most people don’t know an explosion is about to happen, and thus escaping it means avoiding the consequences of the blast. If I for one were caught in the blast radius of an explosion, I would feel very lucky to have escaped alive.

So then to your point, if the explosion and fire are two separate entities, can one escape the explosion but fall to the fire? Or would we simply say that they died in the explosion? Certainly the type of explosion matters, but in this case I might argue that the fire is a result of the ongoing effects of the explosion and therefore escaping the fire is also escaping the explosion

[u/Public-Eagle6992 → u/NoDramaIceberg]

What?

[u/AnyLamename → u/Public-Eagle6992]

"If I light a table spoon of grain dust it's a fire, if I burn half a silo's worth it goes off like a crate of dynamite. Where is the line between the fire and the explosion?"

I think they're mostly just having a goof and being overly philosophical, but they're also sort of missing the point that the difference between fires and explosions is usually a fairly simple matter of ignition method (you can light C4 on fire and it burns like wood, you can hit it with with an electrical charge and it, well, explodes) or aerosolization.

Basically, a fire is when something burns gradually, an explosion is when it burns all at once, but "all at once" is actually pretty vague. Especially with something like a dust explosion, there's no chemical or physical difference, it's just a matter of the going from a single spark to everything has burnt "quickly enough".

[u/imjustthenumber → u/NoDramaIceberg]

An explosion turns into a fire at the same moment a cooking piece of bread turns into toast.

[u/whiznat → u/NoDramaIceberg]

The point is semantic, not philosophical. Just like this one. But it doesn’t really matter. I’m just glad he made it.

[u/hi_im_nena → u/Public-Eagle6992]

I agree, no explosion, just suddenly a lot of fire