Furthermore, although smaller stars are much more common than larger stars (the Sun is actually larger than over 80% of stars in the universe) stars smaller than about 0.5 solar masses (and thus 0.08 solar luminosities) are usually ‘flare stars’ – possessing very strong convoluted magnetic fields and periodically putting out flares and X-ray bursts that would frequently strip away the ozone and possibly even the atmosphere of an earthlike planet.
I have been wanting better stats on this for a while. Basically, what percentage of the eventual sum of potential-for-life-weighted habitable windows (undisturbed by technology) comes from small red dwarfs that can exist far longer than our sun, offsetting long stellar lifetimes with the various (nasty-looking) problems? ETA: wikipedia article. And how robust is the evidence?
I don't know how exactly quantitative I can get beyond 'small stars are bad' - I don't think there's a lot of collation of the necessary data. I can try.
Stars bigger than ~1.2 solar masses (in the middle of spectral type F) would cook Earth-analogs before we had large amounts of multicellular life, though that might not be true for all theoretical lifebearing worlds.
http://www.solstation.com/stars.htm is a fun source for known stars in the solar neighborhood as revealed by the Hipparcos satellite dataset. It might not be as rigorous as the datasets
This is the first in a series of posts I am putting together on a personal blog I just started two days ago as a collection of my musings on astrobiology ("The Great A'Tuin" - sorry, I couldn't help it), and will be reposting here. Much has been written here about the Fermi paradox and the 'great filter'. It seems to me that going back to a somewhat more basic level of astronomy and astrobiology is extremely informative to these questions, and so this is what I will be doing. The bloggery is intended for a slightly more general audience than this site (hence much of the content of the introduction) but I think it will be of interest. Many of the points I will be making are ones I have touched on in previous comments here, but hope to explore in more detail.
This post references my first two posts - an introduction, and a discussion of our apparent position in space and time in the universe. The blog posts may be found at:
http://thegreatatuin.blogspot.com/2015/07/whats-all-this-about.html
http://thegreatatuin.blogspot.com/2015/07/space-and-time.htm