Right, but he's saying that if Earth's own signals fail to propagate even outside our solar system, alien signals will have to be exponentially more powerful than ours to even stand a chance of being received. The distance from Earth to Saturn is tiny in comparison to the distance between planetary systems.
Polynomially. Not exponentially. The surface area of a sphere doesn't grow exponentially with radius.
I'm so glad to see you wrote that, seriously. It is absurd how it has become pop-cultural to use "exponentially".