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Bob

Why would it have to be organic chemistry and liquid water?

I used terms like “it seems unlikely” and “that we know of”.  Yes, it has been speculated that perhaps there is some other chemical basis for life other than organic chemistry, but it seems unlikely.

If you can tell us what sort of stuff the 95% has to work with, we may be able to speculate on what would result.

Dark matter is asserted primarily by analyzing the rotational motions of galaxies and concluding there is a lot of unseen mass there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter

Yet, we don’t see any large collections of mysterious stuff, leading to the conclusion that dark matter is made of weakly interacting subatomic particles that are spread out diffusely.  That does not seem to be a candidate for life.  Life requires the concentration of complex chemistry into localized spaces.  Life is highly complex and structured and localized.  Dark matter seems to be the opposite, highly disorganized and spread out.

The point was that the 95% has 19 times as much stuff as the 5% and probably the same amount of time to work on it.  If we were in the 95% we would probably speculate that there just isn’t enough stuff in the 5% to make anything happen.

More than 99% of the mass of ordinary visible matter in our solar system is in places where life is not possible, our star, the sun.