This paper addresses the next unresolved problem in fusion energy. The central question is no longer whether fusion reactions can occur, but whether a burning plasma can persist as a stable, finite, energy-extracting state while useful power is continuously removed from it. The paper develops a reduced-order framework in which a stable burning plasma is modeled as a living information condensate. In this usage, “living” does not mean biological life or sentience. It means mathematically persistent, self-maintaining, feedback-supported, spatially bounded, and able to survive dissipation. The fusion plasma is treated not merely as hot matter, but as an organized state that must maintain a selected burning mode, resist mode entropy, preserve a spatial body, and release energy without destroying its attractor. The central theoretical contribution is the Calcifer Condition: a single survival inequality that combines self-condensing drive, natural plasma loss, engineered extraction, control burden, basis-hopping loss, and finite-size spatial leakage. Under the stated reduced-order model, this condition is necessary and sufficient for three things to hold together: a positive temporal attractor, a stable spatial plasma body above a critical radius, and a non-empty safe extraction interval. The paper proves fourteen theorem-level results supporting this condition. These include temporal attractor existence, temporal stability, explicit logistic solution, maximum safe extraction, spatial existence, critical radius, extraction lowering the attractor, extraction increasing the critical radius, and the final stable energy-extracting fusion sphere theorem. The framework also includes dimensional and nondimensional audits, a term-by-term provenance map, cross-regime universality, cross-domain universality, nine predictions, and nine falsification conditions. The empirical layer is deliberately framed as first-pass public-data testing, not final plasma-domain validation. On eleven public NIF ignition milestones from 2018 to 2025, a Calcifer-style threshold model outperforms a linear baseline in continuous yield prediction, with higher explanatory power and lower error under the same number of free parameters. The threshold model is also favored by small-sample AICc and leave-one-out cross-validation, though the threshold location remains imprecise at this sample size. A second public-data test uses FAIR-MAST shot 30420. A transparently declared stable-mode proxy is fit with the closed-form logistic solution. The fit shows a broad high-quality plateau across the attractor sweep, with the net growth margin remaining positive across the tested range. This is reported as a single-shot identifiability demonstration: sign-correct, magnitude-robust, and honest about the fact that one shot cannot separately identify every structural parameter. The paper also gives a concrete ITER-class order-of-magnitude prediction for the safe extraction bound under design-point substitution. This is presented as a cross-device prediction to be tested in future multi-shot, fixed-geometry validation rather than as proof that reactor engineering is solved. The conclusion is that stable fusion energy should be treated not only as a power-balance problem, but as a state-survival problem. Lawson-style criteria and gain metrics define the energetic corridor; the Calcifer Condition asks whether an organized burning state can remain alive inside that corridor while energy is extracted. The paper does not replace MHD, transport theory, materials science, tritium breeding, neutron engineering, or full reactor simulation. It proposes a compact reduced-order survival law that these lower-level physics outputs must ultimately satisfy. The framework is structured for falsification. It predicts that stable burn requires a positive survival margin, that extraction lowers the attractor, that extraction increases the required spatial body size, that mode-entropy decline should precede failure, and that the same normalized attractor structure should recur across devices after proper normalization. A pre-registered multi-shot follow-up is identified as the next required validation step. Keywords: fusion plasma, burning plasma, Calcifer Condition, information condensate, reduced-order modeling, fusion stability, energy extraction, temporal attractor, critical radius, spatial leakage, Fröhlich-logistic dynamics, Lawson criterion, NIF ignition, FAIR-MAST, ITER, safe extraction, plasma control, Information Physics Series.
Taekyung Lee (Sat,) studied this question.