It’s not everyday you see an intelligence-agency-backed study on the feasibility of using gravity waves for spying. But that’s exactly what you’ll find here: On the Federation of American Scientist’s blog.

The report is by the JASONs, a semisupersecret group of academic scientists who consult for the Pentagon on technical issues. Apparently the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which coordinates US spying, has been approached by a company called GravWave LLC, which claims that gravity waves can be used for secret communication and sneaking a peak at stuff.

The concept is at first glance intriguing: Gravity waves are waves in the fabric of space and time, and they certainly can pass through objects like the earth with very little effort. Moreover, the company’s plan of converting gravitons, hitherto unseen gravity particles, into photons, light particles that you’re seeing right now, is apparently not completely far-fetched.

BUT (and that’s meant to be all-caps) the JASONs point out that the math behind the scheme isn’t very good. Creating a gravity field powerful enough to image anything would require all the power generated on the earth for the next 100 million years. Worse still, capturing even a single graviton in one of the company’s detectors would take 10^27 seconds—about a million times the age of the universe. “This is a long time,” the report’s authors note dryly.

The JASONs are known for being “very, very smart, and a bit arrogant to boot“, and they clearly had a blast debunking this gravity wave proposal. Plans for gravity-powered spaceships, gravity imaging, and gravity communication are “extremely unlikely”, they conclude, before adding “These benefits and applications are so far from realization that ‘unlikely’ (in the intelligence analyst’s lexicon) is a totally inappropriate exaggeration.”