Remarks on methods of Fontaine and Faltings

In this note we prove the non existence of certain irreducible two dimensional representations of the the absolute Galois group. Such results are predicted by Serre's conjecture and we use Fontaine's methods to verify these predictions in a small number of cases. We also use a methods of Faltings to study certain finiteness conjectures for Galois representations. Key words: Serre's conjecture, Fontaine-Mazur conjectures, Galois representations.